From Fluff to Flourish:
How I grew as a Product Illustrator
Creative work is a journey of growth, not just professionally as your outward skills evolve, but also personally as you uncover pieces of your own inner workings and motivations. I’ve explored many different creative disciplines, always being tempted by another form of expression and experimentation. Transitioning from traditional art mediums to the realm of digital illustration, particularly as a product illustrator on Yellow Card’s UX design team, has been a transformative journey. I’ve often been happily surprised to find that skills honed in a completely different discipline lend themselves to my current work and practice.
For over two and a half years, I’ve delved into the intricacies of vector drawing, continually seeking artistic improvement and more efficient workflows. I’ve had some golden-nugget moments of “Yeaaah! That worked!” and other moments where I felt superbly stuck. With the help of platforms like Medium, Patreon, Youtube, Reddit and Udemy, I’ve always found answers to the tricky questions that arose. I’m keen to share what made the good things golden, and what worked to get the rough ones shining. Let’s get started.
Simple Truths
🍎 A drawing a day
Art is accumulative and no sketch is ever wasted, however wrong or right you may judge it at the time. All those hours of practice really do amass and give back to you. Even if you can’t see the connections from ground-level, once you get a little further on, a little higher up, you’ll see that constant practice makes your work better, faster and more masterful. Draw every day. It’s the most powerful thing you can do. If you skip a day don’t even think about it, just draw again the next day.
👁️ Purposeful Simplicity
Product illustration isn’t illustration for its own sake. The focus needs to be on the product, the brand, and weaving emotional ties. A clear message is the first priority, the visual beauty of illustration itself is secondary. I’ve found that learning to maintain this focus has kept me on a clear track and ensures each illustration is useful in multiple contexts. Setting myself brand constraints within which to work has helped me build structured workflows and maintain a consistent style.
🪆Stay open, stay humble
As an artist, it’s easy to get accustomed to working alone. Being part of a team which is fluent with feedback is such a privilege. But feedback is a strange thing. Ask too wide a group, without giving them context, and you’ll be sorting through opinions trying to find threads of continuity. When you do get straightforward ideas from those who understand the purpose and placement of your illustration, it’s definitely worth exploring workable edits. It’s natural to assume that you know what’s best for your drawing. It’s not always easy to maintain a neutral stance, but I’ve been most delighted when suggestions that I was sceptical about at first opened up new avenues of thought, and ultimately improved my illustrations.
More Complex Lessons
😶🌫️ The lofty goal of subtlety with vectors
I’m a painter by instinct so subtlety has always been an effortless part of my creative process. I didn’t realise how much I took this for granted until I was deep into the clean-lined world of vectors. Here, every point is deliberate and nothing happens by chance. You need to place each piece intentionally. Investing more time in rough sketches really helped me refine images through trial and error. Translating these into vector shapes was then a much smoother flow.
⚖️ Suspension of disbelief
For my current work, stylisation is more important than realism. Having been trained to depict things realistically, it took a lot of practice for me to redefine my priorities. Because of their infinite scalability, vectors need to read clearly even when really small. Sometimes compromises need to be made. For example, the idea of having a realistic light source with corresponding shadows is secondary to creating strong contrasts where they are most needed. It’s also easy to get sucked into adding fun details (especially with characters!) but ultimately readability at a glance is what matters most.
🧱 A design system as inspiration
Working alongside Daniel Udumukwu (aka Nonso, our Lead Product Designer at Yellow Card), has helped me gain insights into how an efficient design system is built and expanded. This has encouraged me to bring some of that same organisation and functionality to the illustration library in my care. Working in Figma, one of my favourite discoveries was finding that a component’s description text is included in Figma’s search function. This allows me to keep each illustration’s name concise and literal, while adding searchable keywords in the description that cover the different contexts for where the illustration could be used. Keeping your image library accessible and organised helps others to choose the best illustration for each specific project.
Not so complex, but not so easy
🫣 Learn to let go
Even when drawing within the same brand, knowledge and skill accumulation is happening in the background. You’ll be improving whether you notice it or not. As with any extended period of work, there will be pieces you’re surprised you were able to pull off, and those you would rather scrap. It can be difficult to keep working with creations you made many months ago, but resist the urge to redraw everything. Refine what you can, replace if you must, but otherwise allow it all to be part of the brand personality you are crafting with your team. The beauty of growth is to learn from each drawing that you do and use what you’ve learnt to draw the next one more skilfully. That doesn’t change when drawing for a corporate brand.
📚 Re-educate yourself constantly
Sometimes we aren’t aware of preprogrammed scenarios or symbolism that we inadvertently perpetuate, but we absolutely need to be. Often I was so focused on drawing as well as I could, I didn’t realise how easily I could step into tropes. Intentionally exploring inclusivity with character design has opened my eyes in so many ways. At first it felt really difficult because it’s so easy to look at brands and assume they’re making inclusive choices for the wrong reasons. Through reading other illustrators’ articles (1, 2, 3) and experiences, I came to understand that ultimately the systems in which we’re working in as illustrators don’t matter so much as the tipping effect our collective work can have. Include enough marginal characters and you assist in normalising what might once have been strange or uncomfortable for the majority. And I’m definitely down to be a part of that, how about you?
🧬 Embrace evolution
Whenever you start a new style, you’ll want to set up those constraints we spoke about earlier to make a structure within which to work well. Taking pieces of that structure apart, or doing away with it entirely can then be jarring. Brands are changing and evolving so much faster than ever before, but it’s useful to see this as a blessing. Instead of resisting change, be on the lookout for opportunities to seamlessly introduce evolution of your style and ideas. Sometimes it’s just stretching an idea out into an “imagine-if-we-could” space, and figuring out the how-to as the next step.
Wrapping up
It’s a wonderfully strange time to be a creative professional. There are a multitude of opportunities as businesses from finance to wellness recognise the power of skillful imagery. Simultaneously, AI image generation looms ambiguously from any social platform or image search. Throughout it all, don’t lose your reason for wanting to create. When you’re working in a corporate context, it can feel tricky to align personal aesthetic interests with brand styles and constraints. Find the angle that resonates most with you and lean into it. Give yourself time to reflect on your progress and to envision what you would personally want to explore next. When we can bring our natural purpose and enthusiasm into our work, that’s when our growth is meaningful, human and most beautiful.
