mini field guides

I’m developing a long to-do list of things that I want to make once I have more free time. One of those ideas came from attending an insect monitoring volunteer event recently. There are so many visual resources out there for community science participants to use, but they often suffer from having too much information, too little information, confusing layouts, or unhelpful images. I would love to have the time one day to design small, unintimidating field guides for volunteers entering community science projects at the introductory level.

I wonder what the best format would be. Ideally, they would be waterproof, so perhaps they could include boxes where the user could keep count of sightings with a whiteboard marker. But what about size and layout? Is 8.5x11” unwieldy? Would images on a halfsheet be too small? One person that I talked to about this idea at the volunteer event suggested flash cards. Are the top 6 species enough to get someone started? Is 10 too much? Should I include both male and female for every species? There are a lot of questions to ask.

It’s easy to spend too much time thinking about solutions rather than experimenting with them, so I started some dragonfly illustrations that I can drop into layouts. I intend to spitball ideas with the insect monitoring group to see what they would find most practical in the field. What would people actually use and find helpful? This is the most important question.