Manual Labor

A continuing freelance job that I do to help pay the cruel bills of adulthood is to make instruction manuals for KidsII in Atlanta, Georgia. My partner in this business, Keith Nakoff, and I work with the KidsII engineers to get the information together and arrange it in the proper order. We put an emphasis on clear imagery and clean linework; the less text (and translations to get), the better. It's as fun as it sounds, but someone's got to do it. Working within InDesign and Illustrator, I gather and format the text (often in multiple languages, and according to company specifications). I trace the drawings in Illustrator from photos or CAD data or reuse drawings from previous manual versions, if applicable. Finally, I edit, alter, and organize all of the visual data into a cohesive plan to put together and maintain these products for infants and small children--which the parents tend to ignore anyway.

Here is a manual for a high-chair that I spent a lot of time on, with several revisions over a two-month period. I left out some pages because let's face it, no one wants to read all that.

These are the Illustrator artboards from the above high-chair.

This is an entertainer from last year.

This is my Illustrator file for the above manual; obviously, I got to reuse many drawings from a previous model. This is normally always a welcome thing in this business.

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