I have had several helpful conversations over the past week, and there have been many good thoughts and suggestions regarding this project.

Kandis Elliot – Scientific Illustrator: Botany Dept./Zoology Dept. 
Kandis had lots of advice and was very generous about sharing her process when approaching scientific illustration – after meeting with her I immediately went and made a reference sheet for Photoshop keyboard shortcuts (I knew the basics, but when you are able to fly through the toolset, it cuts your work time down significantly). We talked about information design, image rendering, and dinosaurs!

Sarah Friedrich – Scientific Illustrator and Media Specialist: Botany Dept.
It was very fun to speak with Sarah (after I went to the correct floor…) It is incredibly helpful to explain the scope of a project to different people, even just to articulate my own thought process out loud, as well as hearing alternate perspectives. We talked about layers of design (especially for organisms with multiple systems to represent: digestive/nervous/endocrine/etc) and were tossing around ideas of how that might be approached as a layering process to integrate the system representation, or if they would be completely separate.

Mike Clayton – Photographer/Collection Manager: Botany Dept.
An incredible resource for imaging suggestions – and generously offered the use of the Botany Dept compound microscope with a screen viewer, on Fridays. In addition to the comprehensive resources of the UW, he recommended looking for existing slides from Ripon Microslide for any specific botanical material. He has also compiled some fantastic images of plant material using a nice quality flatbed scanner (one of the many helpful tips: for 3D objects that you don’t want smashed against the glass: scan with an open top in a dark room – the resulting images are dramatically lit with a deep black background).

Some images from the UW collections: excellent reference points for 40x versus 100x magnification. Right now the only available slides are of root tips, so I am growing an onion from a common bulb in order to get leaf cell samples… (I had one in the kitchen but my industrious housemate discarded it… oh well) For the actual rendering, I am drawing one root’s worth and use it for the other root tips as well, adjusting for different curves, etc).

Marianne Spoon – Chief Communications Officer, Science Writer for the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery
We met to go over the scope and plans for this project. Marianne had some great presentation format suggestions – I had been focusing mainly on the individual images but she was talking about how viewers might encounter the image options on a hypothetical website (i.e. possibly in a compiled image with hotspots on an where people could click on an onion/cricket/etc and then go to the zoomable map view. She was also wondering if the image would go even farther out, zooming out to a room, a building, a country, a planet. Perhaps something to consider in the future – maybe seamlessly link to a separate zoom map, since my files are getting quite large just from a “lifesize” viewpoint! She made me really start thinking about the larger integration of these anatomical maps into their intended application or something that I might not have anticipated!

In other news, I have several reference drawings from our entomology lab cricket dissections last week, so I have started compiling initial sketches of the internal systems for an upcoming map.

(also posted on jwhisenant.wordpress.com)