For Vidit Bhargava, the developer behind the award-winning dictionary app LookUp, learning is a visual experience.

“People remember images better than long blocks of text,” Bhargava says. That’s why he’s spent roughly a decade drawing a picture a day for the app’s Word of the Day. “The illustrations in LookUp are designed to leave a visual imprint.”

Created by Bhargava and his brother, Mudit, LookUp launched in 2014 and debuted its trademark Word of the Day posters soon after. Since then, Bhargava – who, not surprisingly, started his career as an interface and visual designer – has created nearly 3,500 illustrations. (Well, mostly illustrations. “I’m a pizzaiolo,” Bhargava says, “so the image of a pizza for ‘delectable’ is a photo of my own creation.”)

We spoke with Bhargava about creating his visual dictionary – and how he makes an illustration a day.

Tell us a little about the philosophy behind LookUp.

The idea for LookUp came from my own struggle building English vocabulary in high school. As a non-native English speaker, I would often search for definitions, but the results were large, intimidating blocks of text; I really wanted to simplify that.

The app is a dictionary and thesaurus – we use the Oxford English Dictionary as our data source – but it’s an equally helpful vocabulary building tool. You can favourite words you’ve looked up, put them in custom collections and take interactive quizzes on the words in a collection. And it offers a unique Pronunciation Tips feature inspired by my interviews with non-native speakers: in addition to traditional pronunciation notation, LookUp uses AI to create natural-language tips on how to speak a word.

How do you pick each Word of the Day?

I maintain a list that primarily includes GRE (Graduate Record Examination) preparation words, since a lot of our users are looking to enhance their vocabulary or prepare for English proficiency tests; the list also includes interesting words I come across. I often pick a word from this list that inspires an illustration. But sometimes I use a word based on recent major world or sports events – something that’s contextually relevant.

How do you create the daily illustrations?

I use Sketch as my main drawing tool. I also use it to maintain a library of commonly used items – characters I’ve created, objects and graphics – and to build composite illustrations. Some of my most complex illustrations have been created by combining simple shapes and drawings in Sketch.

Other words get illustrations created from mixed-media art. For example, the graphic for “careen” includes a blurry photo indicating fast movement – that’s actually a purposely shaky image I took using my iPhone. And the paint-like effect for “fleck” was drawn separately and imported into Sketch.

Have you integrated generative AI in the app beyond Pronunciation Tips?

We don’t use AI for images or definitions, but we’ve added AI-powered learning features where we can ensure a reliable learning experience. For example, users found our interactive quizzes fun, but they also wanted to learn to use the words in daily life, so we now offer quiz modes that show example sentences and conversations: the app decides which words to quiz the person on, then uses AI to create sentences and questions.

We also have a new Explain feature that generates contextual explanations and usage examples based on the user’s English language proficiency, native language and interests (which you configure in the Explain window).

Our philosophy is to use AI to enhance people’s understanding of words, rather than irresponsibly replacing definitions or scientifically proven learning methods.