Bring your brand to life through illustration
Illustration has finally found its corporate niche in the communication of information and brand personality.
Creating a pleasant and personal style that speaks the brand identity not only creates a nice consistency between brand and product, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) it’s also an incredibly engaging way for brands to speak to their customers in a smoother, more pleasant way. It’s a universal language, with every image worth a thousand words.
As our brand at Airtasker grew, we started to see a real need to use illustration across our website and product in order to convey messages and actions the way we wanted. We also wanted to show the fact that we have a diverse, authentic community — which definitely required some guidelines.
Given that we needed to rethink our illustrations from the ground up, we realised that we also needed to push them further with rules and guidelines. These would then help us create a new style that can be used to truly represent our community as our community really is. This would allow us to highlight our overriding mission here at Airtasker — to encourage people to realise the full value of their skills. By doing this we help form of a diverse community with an appreciation and recognition of people and their personal skills.
The first step — a workshop to get creative 🎨
To start, we needed to understand who we were as a company, what we stood for, and how we wanted to come across to our users
We needed descriptive keywords to help us direct our refresh. So we asked ourselves some questions based around our values:
- If Airtasker was a person, what would their personality & behaviour be like?
- How does our user community see us, and how do we want to be seen?
- How corporate or casual do we want to come across?
- What world do we currently live in, and what world do we want to create?
We pinned these keywords onto an inspiration wall that was made out of all the awesome illustrations that were already out there. We then reflected on shapes, colours, expressions, movements, and aesthetics.
Some explorations 🔭
Three major elements we found to help identify our brand personality 🔍
- Shapes — As a more casual, natural, and relaxed brand we leaned towards round, organic, and free-flowing shapes.
- Colours — We need a varied colour palette because we’re a colourful, flexible, and motivated company.
- Reflection of Community — Our diverse user community called for a style that was inclusive and representative of real genuine people with realistic characteristics (e.g. ethnicity and body shapes) in a natural, flexible, and familiar way.
Where we landed, and nested on 🌱
Having natural assets is a reflection of how we really see humanity. It’s imperfect, it’s fragmented, it’s raw — e.g. textured (broken) lines and round forms.
This deeply humanising side of our app really is important to show in our illustration style, mainly because it helps pass on a sense of trust, friendliness, and familiarity.
At the same time, we kept a clean but cozy style to find an aesthetic balance somewhere within our wide community base — from the younger tech savvy users to the older traditionalists.
We also realised we need to differentiate our treatment towards product and brand materials.
For product, we wanted to focus on being clear, concise and providing a simple experience — mostly because there is a lot less real estate. That means we rarely have the luxury of using illustrations that take the whole screen, especially when there are call to actions and other messages that need to be conveyed. The last thing we want to do is bombard users or distract them from using the platform.
Using straight-forward, front-facing narratives and avoiding backgrounds or words in illustrations help achieves this simplicity for our product. Any more would add to the cognitive load of our users at key moments when they need to be presented with simple, actionable steps.
For brand, we had far more opportunities to add context to reaffirm our personality, all the while keeping in mind that we’re showcasing our platform. We wanted to tell a bigger story and emphasise any qualities we’re trying to portray.
These illustrations can give more context with a supporting background, enabling us to visually highlight situations. It also means we can comfortably include lengthy copy without distracting.
What’s next? 🤸
This has helped us establish the foundation of how we wanted our illustrations to tell stories. It was also an opportunity to embed the values we believe in and be proactive about supporting our community in inclusive ways.
Of course, we’ll still develop and push our illustrations as we go, but this was a great opportunity to tackle the representation and inclusivity of our community. It also definitely gave us room for new considerations that may pop up in the future.
As we expand (as a brand, as a design team and our library of assets) we only expect our challenges to grow too. However, our most important task is to remember that Airtasker is a professional business with a people-focused brand. As of now, maintaining consistency will be our primary focus, as well as knocking out plenty of quality illustrations for our users.
We hope you enjoyed this deep dive into our illustration process! If you have any ideas, comments or questions, please feel free to shoot them at us below — we’d love to hear from you.
Looking for more design inspiration from the Airtasker Design team? Check out our Medium, Twitter, and Dribbble. Want to help us change the world? We’re hiring!
