Alrighty so, you’ve finalized your logo and main brand colors. That’s a biggie, now all you have left to do is develop a series of illustrations that define the entirety of your graphics system. No pressure.

Building an illustration system in my experience is the step that takes and should take the longest. All of your brand assets need to coordinate with each other. This includes any secondary colors that you may pick, and those need to coordinate with the main brand colors also.

Arguably, your illustration system is the most important part of the brand. (Probably giving myself too much credit here as an illustrator.) Your illustration style sets the overall tone and recognizability of your brand and is a core part of your identity.

To build an illustration system you need to ask yourself similar questions you’ve probably asked yourself during creating your logo:

• Who is my audience?
• What are some other similar brands and how do they treat their illustrations?
• What are your competitors doing?

Radom Network is a tech company that provides the infrastructure for service discovery and coordination of your cloud or IoT assets. The audience is highly digitally literate containing a background in tech or at the very

These illustrations don’t need to be super friendly or contain organic/fluid shapes.

Again, not bad. However, these iterations are friendly, bright, and not mature enough for Radom’s audience. There are too many color variations, and the shapes are too round.

To remedy this, in the next iterations of illustrations I have done the following:

• Changed the medium orange color from a peach to a yellow based orange
• Reduced the brightness of the medium blue
• Eliminated the light blue altogether
• Reduced the amount of grays present in the illustrations
• Introduced isometric figures into compositions

For the most part, all of the elements of the illustration system have linear gradient orange borders and gradient fills. Some elements of the illustrations will have soft orange drop shadows to boost contrast, give depth to the darker elements, or as a way to address the focal point of an illustration.

This illustration system I’ve designed relies on a balance of light elements + dark elements. There shouldn’t be a singular solid color, but rather every stroke or nearly every fill should contain a gradient.

As I said before, make sure to test your illustration system with your logo + text to make sure it’s cohesive. Also, definitely feel free to reuse assets. It saves you quite a lot of time of having to constantly re-make illustrations. You can see I’ve reused some of the illustrations in different compositions such as the magnifying glass, the blocks, and smart contract graphics.

At the very least I hope this process was interesting for you to follow.
(I personally love seeing other designer’s scratchboards.)

Wanna talk branding, illustration, or anything else?
Feel free to e-mail me at hello@rikkijanae.com

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Thanks for reading!
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