Making a manual with graphic designer Kristine Lauron

One of the hardest challenges with Themify 2 came from it's continous growth into a bigger and bigger project over time. With the aim of being an interface for Rockbox that the user can customise came a certain level of complexity and confusion with just how much you could do. It was evident that documentation was required, however rather than make it a basic text page in a git repository I wanted to make an inviting and easily navigated user manual.

I'm incredibly lucky that my partner Kristine happens to be a skilful and capable graphic designer. She was already quite familiar with the project, so when I approached her with the idea she was excited to help out. Her work is nothing short of amazing, the resulting manual is bright and inviting, providing everything a user could need to know in a friendly format.

Much of Kristine's work mostly involved designing the layout and dressing the pages to feel like Themify's design language. We wanted the manual to feel playful, so as you can see in her early sketches she was exploring how fun illustrations and the project's mascot could fit in. This work helped to define the goals and atmosphere of the manual project.

As the design progressed, much more of it's own style emerged evolving from the software's UI design. In the image above a lot of the options she presented to me are visible. Kristine was really able to retain a familiar feeling within the design of manual, despite heavily adapting the UI design to suit a book layout.

The finale outcome has an incredibly simple content structure with clear section titles, sub headers for each subject and well annotated instructions. The large text and content boxes make it very easy to parse each page which I really like. The various sections we worked on together, setting up the flow of the manual such that you can read it with zero knowledge of how to use Rockbox and be able to freely customise Themify by the end.

The manual can be gotten exclusively through the free download on the itch.io storefront for the project. We both hope it helps you make the most of your Themify experience!

I'm very grateful to Kristine for helping me out on this, the level of quality with which she delivers incredible and without a doubt has made this user manual far more readable than I ever could. If you're interested in seeing more of her work, check out her portfolio below!