InvisAbility

Project type: Layout, Branding
Timeframe: October 2021 - December 2021
Tools: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

Problem

There is a lack of understanding and awareness of invisible disabilities and very few places to find good information about them. Create a place where the general public can learn more and where sufferers can gather, grow a community, tell stories, and learn more.

Solution

InvisAbility is a magazine dedicated to awareness of invisible disabilities. There are many people who suffer silently and who have nobody that understands what they are going through. InvisAbility intends to foster understanding of silent disabilities in the general public while also providing a communal place to learn about the stories of others, and find connection between new and old sufferers. Each issue also has current news about what type of research is being done at the time.
Each issue is centered around one invisible disability, be it deafness, dyslexia, diabetes or any other disability that is not seen by the eye. This particular issue features anosmia, the loss of smell.

Process

Typography

I chose New Kansas Bold for InvisAbility related headlines. This typeface uses rounded serifs which cuts the intensity that traditional serifs bring, but still has a more human, friendly, down to earth feeling. I wanted to make sure this feeling came through because this magazine’s content comes from a scientific background while also using real, human stories to give context to the disability.

Atkinson Hyperlegible was released by the Braille Institute designed to be incredibly easy to read at all sizes and easy to distinguish each letter from each other. With the possibility of potential readers having eyesight issues or dyslexia I needed to make sure that the type was incredibly accessible.

Colors

Before I could choose a color palette, I had to make sure that whatever colors made were easily distinguishable from each other when seen with different kinds of colorblindness.

If the next issue of InvisAbility was about color blindness and the main colors aren’t different enough for folks to see easily, then it would undermine the whole idea. And, the idea behind having the choice of a pretty wide range of warm colors and cool colors allows an article’s particular mood depending on the dominant color.

Texture

This particular issue of InvisAbility is about Anosmia, the lack of a sense of smell. Something I wanted to do with each issue is to help activate other senses that people might rely on more. For example: folks with Anosmia also lose their sense of flavor and tend to look for texture when they eat. So, I chose to use illustration with tons of textures and different looking material and line quality to make things visually interesting and help activate that sense of touch for Anosmics.

Illustration

With a lot of invisible disabilities, Anosmia is pretty hard to visualize, but the main thing that our illustrations aim to achieve is to show the feeling Anosmia causes, instead of the direct effect. Many illustrations are abstract, reflecting how abstract our own sense of smell is and showing how strange it may be to Congenital Anosmics who have never had a sense of smell, or Acquired Anosmics who lost it and now feel like they are in the darkness.

Tab System

I created a tab system so that folks who are looking for an answer to a question or looking for a research center can find it quickly. Each new tab represents a specific section defined on the Table of Contents page.

InvisAbility Sections

The overview section is for catching the reader up on the basics of the subject.

For Anosmics has self-help articles. The articles in this section usually talk to those with the invisible disability being featured in the current issue.

Outside Support includes information about research centers and places for support. It also has information for people who live around Anosmics to better help understand the disability.

Anosmic Stories is a section dedicated to the stories of those with Anosmia. For this current issue, I interviewed over 20 anosmics, most Acquired, but a few Congenital Anosmics. I wanted to make sure that this section would allow the actual group of people to have a say and be able to truly tell their story.

The Dysosmia section is all about similar experiences with smell. Either about subsets of Anosmia or Anosmia adjacent disabilities like Parosmia and Phantosmia.

Current Events is the place to find all of the recent news on the subject and current studies. For example: with the Anosmia issue, COVID 19 is talked about here due to the number of people experiencing smell loss and Dysosmia as symptoms.