for Logical Position
Logical Position is a digital marketing company specializing in SEO and digital advertising.
Illustration
Documentation
Worked in collaboration with marketing team
Over a couple of years, as the designer working on brand and marketing materials, I had created a vast array of illustrations without any clear direction or illustration voice. Although all the illustrations had some similar elements, as a whole they were disjointed and didn’t reinforce Logical Position’s visual brand.
Create an illustration identity that would showcase Logical Position in a bright, friendly, and exciting way.
Create design principles and rules that will guide future illustrations.
In general, I follow a typical design thinking process with the end goal of create beautiful and functional designs that perfectly align with user needs and business goals.
Research and understand the core company values and principles. How can those translate to illustration?
Gather past company illustrations and look at inspiration. Start sketching ideas and solutions.
Start experimenting with the sketches and get initial feedback. Then apply the design direction while creating the illustration library.
Continue to grow and refine the design. Keep circling back to the illustration principles.
Discover
Before doing any inspiration gathering, I wanted to get a real feel for the voice and impression Logical Position wanted for the illustrations. It was important that the illustrations equally reflect the company’s core principles and values as well as showcase the brand in an exciting and inviting way.
While going through the core brand materials, I found that the company principles and goals were the perfect set of guiding elements. After drafting I ultimately came away with a set of illustration principles. The voice of Logical Position’s illustrations became about showing the excitement and passion for learning, growing, and their clients.
Our illustrations show our love and passion for digital marketing and our clients. Bright and crisp colors bring a sense of excitement to the stories we tell, highlighting the belief that we can achieve great things with our clients. LP’s illustration style should reflect our desire to keep learning and striving to accomplish great things as a team!
Our illustrations bring clarity and enhance content. We use a balanced ratio of neutrals, clean shapes, and lots of white space creating illustrations that don’t overwhelm the user. Each illustration used should be consciously chosen to provide value and reinforce the content’s purpose and goals. Illustration is used as a tool to guide the user and help them achieve their goals.
The Logical Position illustration style should always leave the user feeling they know who we are. Each illustration used is an opportunity to create more trust with our customers and build brand recognition.
Ideation
Once the illustration principles were complete and I had a solid foundation of what the voice would be, I began the process of gathering inspiration examples as well as past brand illustrations.
Each past illustration piece was evaluated through the lens of the principles. What impression did each illustration portray? How did the use of color in the illustrations detract or reinforce the brand? What subtle elements made the brand more unique?
I began picking aspects of each illustration that I wanted to carry forward into the new illustrations.
Past illustrations I had created for various projects for Logical Position. I really started liking the illustrations that had more variety in color, especially a mix of warm and cool colors.
I gravitated towards more polished and techy illustrations, but I didn’t want the illustrations to look stocky and generated. If the goal was to portray a voice that felt bright and driven, but also showed warmth and familiarity, then the illustrations needed to have a mix of bright elements and soft lines.
I was inspired by illustrations that felt almost retro in color usage, where bold and unusual coloring was used. However, I still wanted to maintain a sense of familiarity and warmth in the illustrations. Especially with the limitations of screen space, I did not want the illustrations to become too overwhelming and detracting.
Inspiration (left to right) from Atlassian, IBM, Bolt, Daniel Tan, and Ant Design.
Design & application
By this point I had a solid foundation of illustration principles and a visual style direction I wanted to pursue and I started applying it to some important pieces. The website service pages and value illustrations were a great place to start.
While designing I began to fall in love with the use of bold and bright colors and soft lines and shadows. Adding characters to larger scene illustrations gave more dimension to the designs and really showcased Logical Position’s passion for teamwork.
Design & application
After a couple of iterations, the style was established and the process of building out the illustration brand system and library began. Each illustration was a blast to create!
Design & Application
The goal of this project was not only to create a library of illustrations, but to enable the system to be scalable. Knowing that not having solid direction leads to the disjointed illustration style, I documented the system to guide future designers and established a usage guide for any employee to use.
Learning & Growing
Throughout the whole process of this project, I became very aware that the illustration principles were going to be a huge key to maintaining consistency as well as giving growing room for the future of the brand. The principles would serve as a guiding point to evaluate new design trends.
After creating the library of illustration assets, I quickly discovered that I would need to create a way to share all of the assets with the company as well as provide a way for non designer employees to request additions to the library. All of the assets in the world would do no good without a way to effectively share them. This led me to a new project, to build a brand and marketing asset library and SharePoint site.
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