CASE STUDIES
Sometimes I’m approached with an idea, sometimes I pitch an idea. Let’s go behind the scenes of some of my favorite projects.
“Violet Frances deftly uses abstract forms to elegantly communicate concepts rooted in familiar topics, and familiar forms to communicate abstract concepts. Critically, she excels in understanding which approach will serve the story—and audience—best. I love that I can hand over text manuscripts and primary source papers from scientific journals to her, and she can navigate the jargon and return thoughtful image options for a lay audience. Collaborating with Violet is satisfying on many levels — conversations are productive and thought-provoking, and emailed image files are a treat to open and share with colleagues. Perhaps best of all, she’s able to think through and execute both information design solutions and conceptual art solutions. And she delivers top-notch publication-ready work across the full spectrum.”
—Jen Christiansen, Senior Graphics Editor, Scientific American
“I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”
—Richard Feynman