I worked with the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) to develop an illustration system that would be used to brand their research output over the next two years. Whilst there were some established fundamentals, the system needed to be flexible to enable it to be adapted and remain fresh over such a long period. See below for more on how I approached this.
"It was a real pleasure working with Tim. He really got under the skin of the design brief, and his creative flair and collaborative, flexible approach have been key in making the project a real success. Thank you, Tim - till next time!"
– Jessica Rennoldson, Senior Publications Officer, HPG
Designing the system
I created a series of large base illustrations (two of the five are shown below), with a range of repeated characters representing a topic within the research. Each was coloured differently to help distinguish it from the others.
Individual figures
Some close ups of the individual figures
Then, I created a series of 'cutouts' for each of the base illustrations. These allow masking of the image, using shapes which further suggest themes or aspects of the research:
Finally, I put this all together in a templated illustrator file, which allows the end user to easily customise the graphic (changing size, positioning, cutout, colour). And to make this as accessible as possible, I created a series of short screen-recorded tutorials explaining how to get the most out of the templates, and how to work with the files.
