Erwin Schrodinger was a physicist, most people know him by his theory called "Schrodinger's Cat". I am one of those people, and having never taken a physics class, I knew absolutely nothing beyond that! Not wanting to run the risk of writing math/physics gobbledy gook, I consulted someone at Google who knew physics (about 99% of the company), who explained to me the meaning behind Shrodinger's cat. My first pass at a reference sheet looked like this:
My attempts to explain quantum physics failed spectacularly.
Not a lot of understandable material for me to work with, but a start! After some more back and forth between the physics consultant and the doodle team, I came up with a solution that was fun, creative, and informed by actual knowledge without alienating people who knew physics and people who didn't. This is the sketch:
It looks like the cat is farting, so I knew I had to move it around a lot...
The next challenge was, how do I stylize this? What's the artistic and stylistic inspiration behind the visuals? I don't like making uninformed design decisions, so I did some more research. Since "Schrodinger's Cat" is a term used to explain something very complicated theory in quantum physics, it made me think of how very complicated things are explained in children's science books. I looked up some graphics from some old science books and really liked the graphic treatment and fun illustrations and decided to use that as a starting point. If you look carefully, you can probably see how I selectively stole from my reference to create the final image:
