Above are some of the final iterations of the illustrations I created on behalf of the innovation team as AppDynamics refreshed their people illustrations. Below is the process of how we got to the final result.
To the left is a rough sketch of some characters I created as a start of what the new illustrations could be. I had the motivation of showing diversity in the tech space, so I drew a variety of people based upon my own experiences of working at different tech companies.
Afterwards I colorized my rough line work into a first iteration of these tech characters. Originally I wanted these people to be playful characters that people could identify with that weren’t necessary tied to any specific identity but rather solely based on personality and style.
My next iteration was to see how my characters looked as normal skin-toned people, I also simplified the faces. While I considered these characters charming, ultimately we departed from this direction because it felt too childlike for the brand and there were concerns about how other designers in the future would be able to recreate this particular style.
Above is a one-off exploration of a purple vector illustration style. There is still the emphasis on showing diversity through different tones, hairstyles and facial features. This was dropped once during the illustration revamp process as the marketing team was also in the middle of their own illustration refresh process and we had to adapt to what the other team was doing for the sake of company consistency.
The Marketing team’s own illustration refresh.
So we pivoted as a team to incorporate the work the Marketing team had done, we were departed and continue to put our own unique team stamp on these illustrations was through including facial features and having more flexibility with the clothing and hair shapes.
Another idea we played with was having illustrations that captured working from home versus working at the office with the different ways to dress these characters.
We also did a series of illustrations icons of people feeling a simplified range of emotions. The intended use case would be to describe sentiment either on the internal side with how employees are feelings or how customers of AppD are feeling. Overall this was a great project to explore how to make people feel seen while juggling how to streamline and simplify the artwork to make it as a easy as possible for another designer to recreate.