A worksheet that became a world

This piece first went out in the April 2026 issue of When the Dust Settles. If you'd like future letters in your inbox before they appear here, you can subscribe to the list.

Some projects ask you to become someone you weren't yesterday.

A while back, Manufacturing Skills Queensland came to me with a worksheet. They'd built a careers course for Year 10 and 11 students with a university partner. Evidence-grounded, carefully made, and not quite landing. Students weren't engaging. They needed something else.

I came back with three concepts. The one they chose was Career Factory.

The idea was simple. The student becomes the product. They move through the factory in stages: who they are, what they value, what they're skilled at, what they care about. And the factory matches them, eventually, to a career that fits. A working metaphor instead of a worksheet. A world to step into instead of a form to fill in.

It was supposed to be one visual. One page.

Then they fell in love with it. And the one page became the whole course.

A dozen more worksheets. Slide decks. Ten named characters who turn up across the modules and interact with each other in different ways. Animated explainers, where I literally took the visuals I'd drawn and learned to make them move. Animation wasn't really part of what I offered before this project. I taught myself, one ChatGPT prompt at a time, with a patience I didn't know AI could give me.

The magic moment, for me, was watching that first visual move. Seeing things start to roll along the conveyor belt for the first time. I felt like we'd unlocked a new world.

But the deeper thing, the bit I keep coming back to, wasn't about manufacturing at all.

It was the realisation that a single visual concept, given room to grow, can carry a whole journey. That the same mechanism could be a different world, for a different client, on a different journey. That one page, properly imagined, isn't a deliverable. It's an architecture. And inside that architecture, students stop absorbing information and start moving through something. Relevance, meaning, joy. Instead of evidence, density, dutiful completion.

Career Factory is in classrooms in Queensland this year. The animations are made, the modules are online, the early feedback has been great. It will live in students' hands far longer than the brief that made it.

None of this would have happened without the partnership at MSQ. They could have asked for a tidier worksheet. Instead they trusted the metaphor enough to let it grow into something neither of us had originally imagined. That kind of trust is rare, and it shaped every part of this work.

It also taught me something I wasn't expecting to learn. That I'm allowed to stretch into the work my projects ask me to do. I went into this thinking I was a concept person, not an illustrator. There were stretches of it where I was scared my style wouldn't be good enough for the volume of world it was asking me to build. I came out the other side doing animation work I didn't know I could do.

Where in your world might one page have a chance to become more?