Galactic Illustrations

Galactic Illustrations is a custom illustration system: a cast of characters, a world and a visual grammar that give the brand a voice no stock library could supply.

The system covers everything from hero scenes to empty states, so the same world greets users at every touchpoint.

The brand's communications relied on stock imagery that changed style with every campaign — recognisable as pleasant, but never as THEM. Nothing in the visual language was ownable.

The challenge was to design an illustrated world distinctive enough to trademark in the mind, yet simple enough for any designer on the team to extend.

We began with the brand's personality and mapped it to visual decisions: line weight, geometry, palette, and how much realism the world would allow.

Three families of characters and environments were sketched, tested in real layouts — web, decks, social — and refined into one direction with documented rules.

The design solution is a modular illustration kit: characters built from consistent proportions, a scenery library, and composition templates for the formats the team uses most.

A strict two-accent palette over warm neutrals keeps every scene unmistakably on-brand, while texture and motion guides let the world flex from playful to serious.

The brand now owns its imagery outright — campaigns, product and support all speak the same visual language, and engagement on illustrated content outperforms the old stock imagery decisively.

Most telling: the illustrations are recognised without the logo, which is what an ownable visual world is for.