This week’s Nerdcore Medical collab is a new, improved version of my old How to build a human infographic. Our medical poster project needed at least one embryology graphic, so I revamped my old animated infographic to work as a still image.

For this second try I decided to add a lot more detail to each of the illustrations. I redid every one of the original drawings and added many more steps in the process. I also added a “finished product” image of an adult human, and designed the whole infographic as an IKEA-inspired construction guide.

It was great to get the chance to redo something I made two years ago. It’s always a little weird to look back at something old and realize all of the things I didn’t know about design at the time. For example I made the original illustrations a little smaller than I wanted, and I think I focused a little too much on the animation. This new version is less colorful but I think it’s both more accurate and better designed than my first try.

• Sources

• First Aid for the USMLE Books 1 & 2 (2015). Tao Le and Vikas Bhushan. © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education.
• Embryonic folding and flexion of the embryo. Ben Pansky. Review of Medical embryology book.
• Sections on sperm, eggs, and fertilization. Molecular Biolgy of the Cell. 4th Edition.

This week’s Nerdcore medical infographic is a design on child development. Since a lot development milestones depend on earlier skills, I decided to stack each skill onto all of the previous ones in a waterfall-style area graph.

To make the design I first organized each of the child-development milestones and picked a gradient of colors to match each category. Then I made a custom timeline and cut each milestone color line at the correct time point. Finally I shifted each of the timeline colors to the center so that the entire design looked like a waterfall. I debated for a while where to put the detailed descriptions for each development stage, but I finally settled on a left sidebar to keep things less cluttered.

This would have been a pretty easy design to automate using most design software programs. But I wanted to make a custom timeline to put more emphasis on the earlier years of development. A third of the developmental milestones happen within the first 12 months, and increasing the spacing for the first few years helped emphasize these earlier stages.

• Sources

• First Aid for the USMLE Books 1 & 2 (2015). Tao Le and Vikas Bhushan. © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education.
• Neural mechanism and clinical significance of the plantar grasp reflex in infants. Futagi et al. Pediatr Neurol. 2010 Aug;43(2):81-6. doi: 10.1016
• CDC & NIH National Library of Medicine: Moro reflex, Babinski reflex, Important milestones: Your Child By Five Years.
• Fonts: Abril Fatface by TypeTogether and Arial.

This week’s Nerdcore Medical collab is a paired poster for October’s Hearbeats and heart attacks poster. The last poster showed the EKG wave patterns of 10 different heart conditions, as well as the different parts of a normal EKG wave. This new poster shows the PCG patterns of 11 more heart-related diseases.

EKG waves (also called an ECG) shows the heart’s electrical activity, while a PCG uses a phonocardiograph to plot the sounds produced by the heart. So even though these two posters are made with similar design styles and fonts, the waves look completely different.

Since PCG waves can be a little more hard to decipher as a graphic, I replicated each wave three different times to show the various sections of the sound waves. The first heartbeat graphic shows just the S1 and S2 parts of the PCG wave. The second shows the S1 & S2 combined with the PCG systole sound, and the third wave illustrates the entire sound wave. I also included a small heart illustration showing the anatomical defects that cause each of the different diseases in the infographic.

• Sources

• First Aid for the USMLE Books 1 & 2 (2015). Tao Le and Vikas Bhushan. © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education.
• Heart sounds and lung sounds © 2016 Medical Training and Simulation LLC.
• Patent ductus arteriosus. NIH U.S. National Library of Medicine.