Indeed
Designing an illustration system that scales
As the principal illustrator on Indeed’s 2021 rebrand, my goal was to give the world’s leading job site a more human face by portraying people authentically and mimicking the tactile quality of cut paper. While we initially succeeded in unifying Indeed’s illustration under that vision, the new style struggled to meet all of the needs of such a large company with several different products and teams.
How could we keep the core of the brand alive (humanity, handcraftedness) while also making a more agile, modern, and scalable illustration style? In 2024, as the illustration lead for Indeed’s product design system, I took up the job of figuring that out.
The problem
After conducting a company-wide survey and extensive interviews with design and prdouct teams, the issues boiled down to:
Bold simplicity
By switching the perspective from 3D to 2D, we could design illustrations that thrive in the product space instead of attempting to mimic dimension.
Ditching environment and separating illustrations into subject + background shape allowed for more imapctful, modular assets.
Consistently on-brand
Built-in consistency measures like standardizing background shape size, configuration, and color gave product teams flexibility when using these assets while ensuring quality at-scale.
Style elements like “Indeed Blue” accents created a subtle branding throughout the whole body of work.
Technical limitations
Elements like drop shadow presented scaling and file size issues for product teams.
Because the visual throughline of our inital illustration style relied heavily on effects, when those were lost, so was the brand POV.
Complexity + consistency
Our attempt to convey cut-paper could make illustrations feel difficult to reproduce well.
Designers creating illustrations struggled with proportions, and balancing the cut-paper style with the need to create lifelike characters.
Solutions
Armed with the insights from our surveys and interviews, and partnered with our in-house Design Systems team, I worked to shift Indeed’s brand illustration style to respond to these issues.
What I ended up with was agile, consistently scalable illustration system that still embodied the tactile and human qualities of its predecessor.