Confronting Designer Fears in our Spooky Illustration Project

Every year we try and flex our creative minds when it comes to national holidays; such as Christmas, Easter and Halloween. A great way to showcase how simnple ideas can really engage with an audience and connect with individuals as well as organisations. This year though we decided to speak to our own market, designers and use social media as our platform. We wanted to connect with them using the medium of Halloween. We wanted to create a simple self-promotional piece that would really enagage with designers and connect with an audeince on a common issue and have a little fun. After some initial brainstorming something stood out from all of the other concepts. What scares a designer? We all dread to hear a range of things when working on a project. "How about I come in and sit with you and design it", "Can you make the logo bigger", "I will know what I am after when I see it" and so on. There are so many to list so we distilled these down to a core 4. We then seeked inspiration from classic horror posters and how we could create a set of illustrations that mirrored the quotes that we selected. The style is a slick minimal coloured approach, focussing on minimal lighting, delivered mainly from screens (a common designers tool) and these illuminate the elements of the illustration from face contours to creating shape-shifting shadows. After crafting the illustrations we decided to add a little movement to them to add some dynamism to the posts. Sound also plays a huge part in horror films, creating suspense and drama so it was also important that we had subtle sounds helping support the illustrations. The final set of illustrations are a really fun and playful poke at how designers sometimes fear what clients might say.