My freelance web development work on Electrum Performance led me to establish a good working relationship with the site's two founders, Alex Bryce and Alex Sterner.
Outside of Electrum Performance, both Alexes worked as Strength & Conditioning coaches for a number of places, including the San Diego headquarters of the world-renowned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) gym Atos. The Alexes collaborated with Professor Andre Galvao, founder of Atos, to author a series of e-books that would help professional BJJ athletes adopt a tailored strength training program and gain an edge over their competition.
Once they finalized the text and images of the books, they reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in fully designing the books because they had liked my UI designs for the Electrum Performance site. I agreed, and took on the project part-time.
This was my first time designing an e-book (actually 2!), so it was quite an experience. I don't have a formal graphic design background, so I ended up just applying many of the design concepts I picked up through art classes, prior work experiences, and web development — like color theory, consistency, visual hierarchy, and white space.
On one of my calls with the Alexes, I nervously asked if Professor Andre Galvao (a celebrity in my eyes) had liked my e-book designs. You can imagine how happy (and relieved!) I was when Alex Bryce excitingly told me, "You know, I showed Andre the designs and he broke into a huge smile. He said one word, 'Awesome', which is basically his way of saying he loved them."
Organization: Electrum Performance and Atos Jiu Jitsu
Designing the e-books was a solo freelance project for me, but I did regularly jump on calls with the Alexes to ask for feedback and to understand timelines
Matt, my partner in crime who helped us get the freelance project for the Electrum Performance website, helped me with administrative things like logging hours and billing
I worked as the sole designer for both e-books, one for Gi BJJ and one for No Gi BJJ.
For about a month and a half, on weekdays after my full-time software engineering job at Morningstar, I worked on designing the 2 e-books.
I spent the first 2 weeks familiarizing myself with Canva and mocking up a few "lightweight design system" ideas (reusable design components). My goal was to create a modern, sporty design that would be attractive to athletes, so I utilized bold text and bright colors.
Because the two e-books were complementary and part of a set, the main challenge for me was coming up with 2 color schemes — 1 for the Gi book and 1 for the No Gi book — and designs that would highlight those 2 schemes. After a number of mockups, I settled on an electric blue (with dark blue as secondary and orange as tertiary) for Gi and emerald green (with dark blue as secondary and periwinkle as tertiary).
After finalizing the designs, I spent the remaining time filling up the content (text, images) for the books — this surprisingly was a lot of manual work, and I found myself wishing more than once that I could pass a template, text, and images to Canva and it would automatically generate pages for me!
I ended up manually putting together the final, designed versions of the English and Spanish versions of the e-books (the text and images were provided to me) and then handed the designs over to another designer so that they could finish the remaining translations (Portuguese, etc.).
Canva — for creating the e-book designs and putting all the content together.
Adobe Photoshop — for editing and optimizing images included in the e-books.
Microsoft Word — for creating tables (for exercise programs) since Canva at the time didn't have support for complex table designs.
Smallpdf.com — at the time, Canva had a hard limit of 30 pages for e-book PDFs. So for each e-book, I created a series of PDFs (part 1, part 2, part 3, etc.) and used Smallpdf.com to join those PDFs together. I also used Smallpdf to optimize and compress the final PDFs without losing quality.