A Lot of Love and a Little Bit of Science

Making a baby through assisted reproduction takes a lot of love and a little bit of science

Even though the most important ingredients in assisted reproduction are a lot of love and a little bit of science, assisted reproduction can seem scary when you first start learning about it. It can seem like science fiction when you hear words like five day frozen embryo transfer and embryo grading. Even things like cycle monitoring and timed intercourse can seem like you’re taking the human element out of making a human.

For people facing infertility when trying to grow their families, often times there is a lot of science involved. But for every grain of science there are buckets full of love involved in the process. For those of us who seek the help of fertility specialists, we usually end up seeing that there is love behind the science and it stops being so scary. The testing, the procedures, it is all there to help us make sure that we have a strong and healthy environment to grow a strong and healthy baby.

We go to the doctor and seek the help of medical science to treat arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, broken bones, and every other injury, ailment, infection and disease you can think of. We don’t shame people for taking insulin, getting a cast put on a broken arm, or going through chemotherapy… So why should getting help to grow a family be different?

Babies born through assisted reproduction don’t happen by accident. Each step of the process is entered into with intention, care, love, and commitment.

The idea behind this design is to showcase the truth that for each and every life created through medical intervention it takes a lot of love and a little bit of science. This is not something to be afraid or ashamed of.

Love and Science Design Process

This design did not change much from my original mock up sketch. I knew I wanted a plant that was being watered by a watering can representing love and fertilized with a small packet of nutrients representing science. I just had to play around a bit with size and spacing, weight and balance. I also had Malcolm add the text because I knew that real fonts would look better than my handwriting and printing.

It was important to me to include a pineapple on the fertilizer packet because the pineapple has become a symbol for infertility and I felt it would resonate for those within the infertility community and highlight that we are dealing with reproductive science and not some other type of science. I ended up going for two pineapples just because I like symmetry and I thought that having the word “science” straight across the packet rather than on an angle would look more official.

At first I tried keeping the plant small, but it felt like it was being swallowed up by everything else in the image. I have to admit that one of my favourite things about digital art is that you can resize parts of the image without affecting anything else or having to redraw it.

I toyed around with making the fertilizer packet smaller, but I knew that I still needed the printing on it and the pineapples to read clearly. I was also concerned that a smaller packet would make the image look too unbalanced with the large watering can on the other side. I resized the packet several times and ended up with it pretty much the same size as it had been in the sketch. I used the amount of water flowing out of the can in comparison to the small sprinkling of fertilizer to sell the idea of a lot of love and a little bit of science.

I kept the cartooney design and colour palette to make the design as friendly as possible and try to highlight that this is a good thing and not a scary dystopian sci-fi thing.

A Lot of Love and a Little Bit of Science Products

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