THE BRIEF
Sarah Kalil has created a self-directed online course called “The trailblazer’s guide to the stars” for navigating the strengths and pitfalls of several mental phases that we live through when trying to achieve a project or development. It is separated into different “characters” which all have their different behaviours, signals and mental states that define them. She then explains how to make the most of these phases and how to get out of their depths to move on to the next phase.
THE PROCESS
To make these phases more visually representable, she opted to have the characters illustrated by me. These illustrations are vital to the courses visual representation and help the users identify the stage quickly and turn a more abstract concept into an easy to grasp character.
To start with Sarah provided me with the preliminary branding planned for the course. The colours, main key inspiration words and style showed her rough direction.
First I would receive the character profiles so I could see what the essence of this character was all about.
Then some brainstorming to start with.
I worked together with Sarah in developing the background, pose, look and feel of each stage until it truly represented the character.
The first step is to define the direction of the vision of the character, together via Pinterest. Research images and comments/notes help shape the idea in a collaboration.
Then, sketches showing different concepts and ideas that were discussed in the research phase are created by me. The best will be picked for the final painting.
Once a painting has been created and digitally scanned and enhanced, further changes can be made if needed. Here, details of the background were worked on for the final image..
The final design.
THE DESIGNS
THE RESULT
These Illustrations were then fully integrated into the website of the course as a visual navigation system for users and to quickly find their way through identifying phases and their associated feelings. The result is a light, energetic website with simple layout to fully make use of the impact of the illustrated characters.
(website design by Alice Karolina and Genevieve Mari)
In total there are 10 characters which have very different looks, styles and purposes. The colour variations are deliberate to represent their mental state also. To unify all these varied characters, more abstract backgrounds with splashes were designed to keep the focus on the figures and blend them together easily.
