City of Darebin
I created a series of editorial illustrations that featured throughout the City of Darebin’s Business Connection magazine. The Business Connection presents stories, insights and ideas from Darebin’s leading businesses.
My role
Illustrator
After an initial brief from Wedsites, I worked on a set of moodboards to help us align on an overall direction for the brand. Based on the moodboards I developed series of options for the brand’s visual expression; looking at typography, color palette and overall look and feel of the brand. Once an approach was decided upon, I created a small brand guidelines book to specify the various aspects of the visual language. I create a set of printed stationery, set up social media templates for their team to use, and designed a set of worksheets which were posted to the Wedsites blog as a resource for their users.
The final visual expression of the brand balances a modern, clean approach with a romantic and feminine aesthetic, to appeal to the sensibilities of the target audience. The combination of typographic styles – pairing a hand-drawn script font with both serif and sans-serif fonts– along with a broad color palette, gives the brand adaptability and flexibility. They have the abilitiy to pair typefaces and use the color palette in a range of ways to achieve different tones in their communication, while still maintaining a consistent brand expression.
In developing the illustration style, Wedsites tasked me with creating a character design for “Wendy the Wedding Planner”, along with a series of illustrations that could be used on empty state screens within their product to guide users through the onboarding process of the platform. The illustration of Wendy needed to convey the qualities of a quintessential wedding planner – super organised, compassionate, calm, attentive to detail, budget-savvy, and resourceful. Wedsites requested a restricted color palette that complimented the UI of their product.
After several iterations of the character, we aligned on a final design guided by feedback from the Wedsites team and insights from their target audience. I then created a series of 10 illustrations for the required empty state screens.