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Forbes is a global media company, focusing on business, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership, and lifestyle.

I had the opportunity to join forces with Forbes and create a bunch of illustrations to promote the revamp of their membership plans. The new model focuses on adapting the content for each user’s preferences.

With the illustrations I had to portray characters of the key target groups and bring to life the different content categories.

Inside the brief

Mood board and references

The Forbes brand has a rather sophisticated and clean look and that was something we wanted to apply to the illustrations as well. It was important to find the right balance and escape the blandness of overly minimalist characters, we’re used to seeing in a lot of digital products. The metaphors had to be straightforward and easy to read.

The team provided a bunch of different references on both - styles that fit and styles that were too playful.

From concepts to color

Illustrating the world of Empower

From concepts to color

Concept sketches, characters and colors

Concept sketches and characters

Once we were clear on the goals, I got my hands on the concept sketches. I based the characters on the three personas described in the brief - Sarah, Bill and Pete. Each of them had different interests that had to be depict in the illustrations - investing, journalism and blockchain.

A simple color palette with Forbes’ signature red as an accent made the final illustrations flexible and easy to adapt for different designs. Converting black lines and shapes to white ones worked great for dark backgrounds, which often appear in Forbes’ marketing collateral.