EDITORIAL & ILLUSTRATION PROJECT: MITO (Motor Industry Training Organisation) ‘The Truck Book': Professional Skills for Driving Trucks‘
The Truck Book is an all-you-need-to-know resource for truck drivers, used by learners going through apprentiship programmes and courses, and by drivers already in the industry.
It was a almost-300 page resource originally produced in 2012, but was recently refreshed to stay in line with updates in equipment and machinery, and to update the design of the content. There was a lot of information to arrange to keep readers engaged in the fun side of the industry and also the serious side of operating such large vehicles.
I joined the project at the start of 2019 after an initial design concept was established by a previous colleague. As a team of two, myself and a colleague redesigned The Truck Book – I drew the majority of the heavily technical illustrations, designed the front cover and layed out six of the nine chapters.
I also helped the Project Manager to develop a thorough plan of the project – assuring the content was rewritten to our timeline, facilitating the printing of the book, and researching distribution options to MITO learners.
Getting the cover right is very important as it is the make or break point to keep the reader engaged – to do this I utilised some of the technical diagrams from the book combined with the grungy texture.
The illustrations that I drew for The Truck Book originated from either very low quality version from the book’s first edition, from rough sketches by Subject Matter Experts, or from other truck resources – all of these reasons meant that these illustrations required very accurate redraws. I was able to pull on my skills of comprehending 3D objects’ scale and perspective in order to accurately create these diagrams.
A key challenge with the design of this book was breaking up the large sections of text – utilising tables and big photos of trucks “out and about” helped keep the reader engaged and communicate the key points.
