Drawing software
that doesn’t
go out of date

The brief

SAI360 sells governance, risk and compliance software — the kind bought by committee, evaluated against a requirements matrix, and configured differently for every customer. The company needed a visual language for explaining how the product works: how-to and how-it-works illustrations for sales material, documentation, onboarding and internal training.

Screenshots were the obvious answer and the wrong one. A screenshot ages out at the next release, shows one customer’s configuration when the whole pitch is flexibility, carries live data you can’t publish, and has to be recaptured for every language. At the scale required — the illustrations are numbered against a documentation outline, running to nearly a hundred — recapture would have been a permanent tax.

The approach

I drew the interface instead of photographing it, and made one editorial decision that carries the whole system: only the labels that teach get to be words. Section headers, chart titles, column names and calls to action are set in real type. Everything else — body copy, record names, numbers, dates — becomes a grey bar.

That single rule does a lot of work at once. The reader’s eye goes straight to the feature being explained rather than getting lost reading invented sample data. No customer information is ever exposed. The artwork doesn’t need re-translating, because there is barely any text to translate. And when the product ships a new release, the drawing is still true, because it describes structure rather than pixels.

The second decision was compositional. Rather than showing flat rectangular screens, each illustration lifts one element — a filter panel, a chart, a dropdown, a confirmation email — off the surface and floats it in front, with soft shadow and generous white space around the whole assembly. That’s the equivalent of a pointing finger: it tells you which part of the screen the paragraph beside it is about, without needing a callout arrow.

Colour is doing real work too, not decoration. Blue is the interactive layer — links, primary actions, active data. Grey is inert content. Saturated red, amber and green appear only where the product itself is making a judgement: risk heat maps, severity dots, impact scales. In a compliance tool, colour is the meaning, so the palette had to stay disciplined everywhere else for it to read.

What I made

Close to 100 illustrations spanning the platform’s modules, versioned and numbered against the documentation structure they served. The set covers Policy Management, Hotline & Incident Management, Contracts & Third Party Risk, Conflicts of Interest, Gifts & Hospitality, Internal Audit and Business Continuity Management.

The formats repeat deliberately across modules, which is what makes it a system: list views with filter and action controls, analytics dashboards, form and disclosure flows, document and workflow states, and integration moments where the platform hands off to something else.

Name the tool and say whether you built a reusable component library

Where it landed

Say where they were used — sales, docs, onboarding, web — and whether they're still in service

One line on longevity — the system still being in use is the result