The biggest use cases for our corporate illustrations are social media and web. It’s especially important to have a defined illustration style for social media, where we want our brand to look cohesive and modern even across all of the one-off press releases, events, campaigns, and other posts.

We set the goal of having a small library of illustrations at the end of this project that would be a solid launching pad for creating a full, sustainable library. We focused on creating illustrations with varying levels of scale and detail based on common placements and requests.

A huge constraint with this project was that our new brand color palette was being developed simultaneously with the illustrations, so everything was first built as a one color red illustration (since red being in the palette was kind of a given). We developed patterns to be able to stay in one color but still add texture and dimension.

In creating our small launch library and defining our style, we worked closely with the web team to define best practices for specs, stroke weights, color distribution, composition, and pattern scale. We also worked with them to find appropriate places in the main nav on Red Hat’s website to incorporate the new illustrations and test how they work with our other brand elements and UX patterns.