An illustrious journey
Crafting a unique illustrated story for products
About a year ago, we started to redesign one of our core product offerings at Capillary. The initial months went into rethinking the product and since then, we have refined the workflows & interactions. A large amount of effort went into defining the visual language. But the product still lacked something. We figured that we had to bring in some visuals to break the monotony of screens and tell a visual story of the product itself.
The visuals could help set the mood or explain the product context a little better. Most importantly it was visual storytelling of the product & brand.
Sravan created a visual mood board based on the brand temple and the keywords which stood out were; ‘Dream’, ‘Storytelling’, and ‘Passion’.
We inferred that characters in our illustrations would be floating in a dream-like state pursuing their passion. The backgrounds would be smoky and blurred to accentuate this dream-like feeling.
John used a rich colour palette and rendered drawings in bright colours.
We were keen to add this to the product screens. The real estate available for the illustration was very small. But it did lend a lot of value in terms of adding context to the screen.
But we were not content. We started to question if we could push ourselves and create a very unique voice of our own.
Shaan did his own study and provided recommendations.
One important insight was to concentrate on building the ‘intrigue’ & ‘emotional relationships’ in the stories.
Manuel stepped in to lend his expertise. He churned out a few variations in story and style.
We saw some inspirational work done by Alice Lee for Slack. Google Calendar mobile app uses the work of Lotta Nieminen to break the monotony.
We loved the journey of Dropbox and the efforts they put in over the last decade. We studied the rebranding of Mailchimp. Interestingly Collins was the agency which worked with artists for evolving the new illustrations for both Mailchimp and Dropbox.
We realised that content & storytelling was more important than style.
We wondered if we could abstract our ‘storytelling’ by drawing inspiration from mythology.
Manuel explored further and drew surrealism into his work.
We are working with the marketing team to enrich the product story further. We hope to discover more.
