The University of Buffalo asked Attention Span and me to partner on another futurism project. The result is this is a beautifully designed, deeply investigated look into what the future holds in the medical and healthcare spaces.
Process
The biggest challenge for the design team and me was to create a new visual style for this report that differed from the more stark, medically inspired one used one used in it’s predecessor, the Future of Medicine. We found inspiration everywhere and were drawn to bright, colorful depictions of people and objects in particular. In contrast to the Future of Medicine, we wanted the Future of Health to spotlight people, and how the future of the medical industry was going to impact them. We developed a massive color palette and a limited but strong graphic typeset.
On top of that we wanted to ensure that the report felt as futuristic visually as it did content-wise. We introduced some common components of glitch and Sci-Fi art like thin lines, glowing elements, static / noise, etc… Once we had a solid foundation artistically we got to work.
Cover
I led work on designing the cover of this project as I did with our Future of Medicine report. The team and I discussed how best to evoke the feeling of the book overall in a single design. After some deliberation and sketching we all agreed on an approach. I created forms reminiscent of germs or other microscopic particles created using friendly, bright, and optimistic colors, the same ones we use throughout the report. This served to elicit the more upbeat feeling we wanted the report to have, and conveyed the health / medical subject matter of the book’s contents.
We used a layout similar to that used in the Future of Medicine to link the reports visually. We did distinguish the text by pulling out the cross in the “t” in health as a way to emphasize the focus on healthcare.
Contributions
In addition to the cover, I led the design of seven of the reports spreads, spanning three topics, designing two to four illustrations for each about the future of prosthetics, the future of longevity, and the rise of self-health technologies. Each had its own set of hurdles, but the final designs beautifully reinforced each topics’ content.
Results
This was an incredibly satisfying project to work on and to this day the material I produced for it is some of my favorite work. Take a look at the online version or the PDF to see the full scope of the project first-hand.
