Illustrating 4 million customers and bringing them to life
By Charlie Lewis, Creative Designer
Dec 8th 2021With over four million customers as of last month, TotallyMoney is well on its way to helping lots of people achieve their financial goals.
As part of our celebrations, I created some new illustrations, signifying this huge achievement by the team.
When I joined TotallyMoney earlier this year, the character set we had was being used sparingly. I set out to give them a story, embedding them across the brand and making them a vital part of TotallyMoney's visual design.
Illustrations reflecting values
At TotallyMoney we’re on a mission to help everyone move their finances forward, so it was important this was reflected in the expanded illustrations. We regularly speak with our customers, so we know we have a very diverse group of users with different needs.
So as well as making sure the new illustrations reflected our customers, we wanted to make sure they reflected our values too.
At the same time, it was important they stayed true to the existing tone and illustration style, originally produced by Bali Engel.
The characters needed to convey the joy and sense of achievement we felt as a 100-person team, and that the people in the illustrations could be either TotallyMoney employees, or customers. As a customer-centric business, we wanted to make it clear we’d reached this milestone with our customers — not just by getting them to sign up for our service.
As with all the illustrations I do, which you can see in our emails and in the app, I started off by doing some rough sketches on my tablet, getting a feel for each character. Once the individual characters had been sketched out, I built up the scene in layers, the rough sketches getting less rough with every layer.
Once I was happy with the sketches, I added colour and detail, taking the characters from rough sketches to full characters, with a life and voice of their own. Although we have a set palette, I enjoy the challenge of creating the right visual balance with colours specific to the illustrations.
And here's how they turned out!
