Spot Illustration Refresh
About Moz
Moz was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004, believing there was a better way to do marketing. Focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), they eventually developed a marketing toolset aimed at providing search data and analytics to digital marketers. Because Moz was founded as this area of specialty was being created, Moz has stayed true to its roots as a place that people new to the field can develop their skills.
Project Overview
In taking an inventory of various Moz properties managed by different teams, the Design team realized that our Moz Academy pages were out of alignment with our current brand voice. I was asked to spend some time auditing the pages and making recommendations for how they could be improved within the constraints of the learning management provider we were using to host the content.
The solution we landed on seemed simple enough at first: we would provide access to a library of spot illustrations already created for other teams to use. On further investigation, we discovered that our spot illustration library also hadn't been updated to reflect our current color palette, and that some illustrations were dated, inelegant, and in need of a facelift. They were also inexpertly created, and contained design artifacts that may have been useful in previous incarnations of design software, but were unnecessary given current capabilities.
As awareness of the project grew, what started as a library of 36 illustrations became a library of nearly 80. It turned out that we had spot illustration luring in folders and pages that hadn't had a designer look at them in years. I collected all of the illustrations for rebuilding.
The new library contained illustrations with new visual concepts and branding as well as some communicating entirely new concepts, for a total of 79 new images added to our spot illustration library. Full color and single color versions of each illustration were created. Below you will find a few of my favorite before and after comparisons.
Documenting the work for reuse
Because my primary work at Moz was as a UX designer, I began this project knowing that I would ultimately be handing it off to the visual design team. They were too overloaded with their work on our annual conference to dedicate time to this project at the time. While the number of illustrations I created was extensive, I did not assume that I had captured every possible illustration that Moz would ever need! To make the transition as easy as possible, I held a workshop with the UX + visual design team to show the team how I created the images and walked them through the visual language I used to guide my style choices.
