Wistia Illustration Style
As a part of Wistia’s larger branding overhaul, I created a new style of illustrations for the company that would push forward the visual style and could be used across all platforms. This new illustration style is full of texture and movement, giving a hand-drawn, human look to reflect Wistia’s unique and approachable personality as a company. I worked closely with art director David Sizemore and designer Danielle Bushrow to establish direction and feedback for the project.
The process involved a thorough exploration phase to discover a new visual style for illustrations that felt on-brand. This involved creating moodboards to get an understanding of visual elements that best reflected the brand, adapting existing illustrations into various styles, and generating, testing, and tweaking various textures, colors, and compositions.
Development process
After an initial assessment of the brand, I identified a few dimensions to create and evaluate styles with alongside stakeholders.
From initial explorations, we found that one iteration was most successful. That became the new baseline for continued style exploration, and from there, I incorporated additional feedback into a new scale that showed additional styles.
Moodboard to establish baseline styles and attributes that are aligned with Wistia's brand.
Following that baseline, recreating an existing illustration to visually fit into those categories.
Identifying certain visual elements' value in image type.
Progress explorations mocked up with website copy.
Identifying different levels of texture that feel on-brand.
Experimenting with different ways of incorporating texture into background shapes.
Testing a variety of color palettes.
Direct comparison of palette ideas, mocked up to help visualize in context.
Example of an illustration that has been updated visually to the final style, with new storytelling options as well.
Final style attributes
Once I finished iterating on the style and had incorporated multiple rounds of feedback, I landed on a few key attributes that make this style what it is:
Use of imperfect vector shapes to create a more organic and hand-made appearance
More haphazard, dynamic, and layered compositional structure in illustration should be used to mirror other forms of representative imagery on the website
Background shapes ground the content of the illustrations, while textured lines masked within those shapes continue the dynamic nature throughout
Color palette can be limited to any one brand color, plus brand blue as an accent color, in each illustration to pair with a page or feature
