A passion for representing facts in an elegant way has led KAUST’s Ivan Gromicho to recreate past and present worlds through infographic design.
“As a kid, I was fascinated by the magazine illustrations in National Geographic, Scientific American and others. I still collect them to this day,” says Ivan Gromicho, senior scientific illustrator with KAUST’s Research Communication team.
“I loved how the artists presented information and facts in such a beautiful and elegant way, and I was interested to follow in their footsteps. I grew up in an artistic household, with painters, sculptors and graphic designers in my immediate family.”
During his master’s degree, Gromicho specialized in the recreation of extinct creatures in their ecosystems. “I’m passionate about nature, animals and human anatomy. It’s exciting to represent details of our current world that we cannot usually see: biological realms, marine ecosystems, even the subsurface structures beneath our feet.”
At initial meetings for the development of KAUST Insight, Gromicho suggested incorporating double-spread infographics that would highlight archaeological sites, medical innovations and the natural environments of Saudi Arabia to enrich readers’ knowledge of the country. One such example was the formation and geology of the Al Wahbah crater, northeast of Jeddah, which is one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. At 2.2 kilometers across, it is the largest of the country’s many volcanic-related craters and has been estimated by KAUST researchers to be slightly more than 1 million years old.
“One of the hardest elements of representing geology through illustration is the scale – not just the scale of the surface and subsurface landforms, but also that of deep time,” says Gromicho. “Accurately capturing the sheer scale of the Al Wahbah crater was an interesting challenge.”
Read more at KAUST Insight.
