Discord Product & Marketing Illustration

Stakeholder: Discord
Role: Senior Illustrator, In-House

Over the span of several years, I produced many illustrations for Discord's app, website, blogs, social media, and beyond. Discord's visual style was strongly defined and revolved around a limited cast of characters, sometimes accompanied by kooky creatures serving as the denizens of the Discord world. The illustration shape and color language was restricted to connect illustrations across Discord's many surfaces and built strong brand recognizability with users.

For the majority of illustration projects I worked on, the illustration process would begin with at least two concepts for each piece. Feedback would determine the final direction, which would be completed to spec with Discord's brand style in vector format. Although illustrations would often serve different functions, projects would always be finalized with close attention to deliverable specs so that product designers, animators, or other artists would be able to edit files and use exports for their respective needs.

During this time, I worked with teammates to create an internal database of illustration assets, character turnaround sheets, and deliverable specification guidelines to ensure consistency across illustrations and more easily onboard new illustrators to the team's processes. Discord's illustration team was composed of five illustrators and embedded within the larger Art School team, including graphic designers, animators and copywriters, who we would often collaborate closely with.

Family Center 2023

Discord's Family Center was released to give parents and their teens the information and tools necessary to use Discord safely and navigate the app together.

Concepts
The primary focus of these illustrations was to demonstrate how the Family Center provides guidance and tools for guardians to help young Discord users stay safe online. While thinking about concepts, I was careful to avoid concepts that would alien users by representing a narrow concept of "family" and representations that show Discord as an inherently unsafe place. To focus on an expansive definition of guardianship, and to represent safety risks as an inevitability of participating in an environment, I focused my concepts on a camping analogy.

To draw this analogy, I illustrated Discord's mascot Wumpus alongside characters Bread Dog and Locke. Usually represented as a wise and mature wizard, Locke would be shown as a park ranger helping Wumpus and Bread Dog understand environmental risks, best practices for safety, and helpful tools as they prepare for a good time in nature. I explored two sketches for each illustration, for a total of four final illustrations: one hero and three spots.

Final Illustrations
Once sketches were approved and received feedback, I completed the hero illustration and one spot illustration. My illustration teammate Alexandria completed the other two spot illustrations (finals not pictured).

Voice & Video 2022

Project Description
As apart of a broad overhaul for Discord's mobile Voice and Video features, I created several in-app empty state illustrations to represent new capabilities and improvements to existing features.

Research & Development
This project had the fairly straightforward goal of representing in-app features, so concepts were focused on explaining app functionality using brand characters and narrative voice. To enhance the visual and conceptual interest of these pieces, I explored concepts that represented features through analogous activities and social interactions. Functions like "screen sharing" and "activities" were expanded into relatable analogies by showing characters having sleepovers with friends, screening movies, and enjoying hobbies paired with easily recognized UI elements that help users understand how features are integrated within the app.

Final Illustrations
After receiving feedback, the final illustrations for screen sharing, a screen-still-running notification, and steam running and ending were finalized. Discord's mascot, Wumpus, is used as the central character in these illustrations to represent the Discord user.

App & Bot Directory 2022

Discord launched its App Directory to create a user-friendly, centralized portal within the Discord app for users to search for and add apps and bots to their servers without relying on third-party services. I was tasked with designing a hero and spot illustrations to support the feature's launch within Discord's app and on web.

Research & Development
Prior to this project, team lead Justin was creating illustration concepts for early stages of this feature's development. I contributed several character concepts early on, all of which became canonized in the imagery supporting app and bot development and user support features. These robots took inspiration from appliances and animals to create friendly hybrids that evoked different eras of technology design. Included are a friendly crab-shaped coffee machine, a nervous puppy with a big back wheel, a sleepy retro disk-drive radio on wheels, and a relaxed and elephant vacuum inspired by a roller blade. My goal was to design lovable critters to endear bots and apps to users who were unfamiliar with these features.

I was tasked with designing a hero illustration and one spot illustration that would later be animated. I wanted to explore the concept from different angles, chosing to explore the concept of Bot & App Directory in two different ways. In the first, characters are shown playing games in a gaming workshop where they have developed bots that help operate their electronics, carry out chores, and keep them company. This concept focused on showing users interacting with bots to enhance their space and reduce work to make more space for fun. In the second concept, I focused on bot browsing and acquisition by showing characters adopting bots with different functions from a digital platform. I wanted to capture the feeling of browsing animals for adoption and instantly falling in love.

For spot illustrations, I wanted to explore a wide range of concepts, communicating the concept in different ways while exploring different animation strategies. I designed each illustration to be puppeted easily by the animator through a combination of character objects and masking, indicating in some sketches how I imagined the motion taking place though largely leaving the decision up to the animator's discretion.

In the first two concepts, I focused on the bot itself. In the first concept, the bot types a command on a hovering keypad indicated by a slash command followed by a variety of emojis. In the second, the bot bounces jubilantly with a happy face displayed as a slash-command on its screen. The later two concepts focus on a character representing the user. Both concepts shows the character browsing bots on a floating screen, with one concept referencing Discord's UI, and the other concept opting for a slightly more video game style polygonal mesh.

Final Illustrations
The window shopping concept was selected for the hero illustration. I received feedback that showing a coffee cup in the central speech bubble felt disconnected from actual bot functions. I replaced this with a gaming controller to represent game-based activities and features specific to gamers, since this makes up a large part of Discord's user base. The character browsing bots in Discord's UI was selected for the animated spot illustration, allowing us to represent user interactions and highlight the variety of bots available in the Directory. A simplified color palette was used for the browser window so that the illustration would feel balanced, as this area contained a lot of small detail.

Premium Membership 2022

Discord launched Premium Membership services, a feature which would allow server owners to create membership tiers with special rewards for subscribing users. I was assigned to create a hero illustration and three spot illustrations to accompany the release of this feature. I created all initial concepts, with support on the final hero illustration from team leader Justin.

Research & Development
The focus of the hero illustration was to represent how premium membership allows server owners to provide an enhanced experience for server subscribers. After talking through concepts with my team, we decided to use birds and birdhouses to represent the server owner, members, and server environment. This concept would allow for a wide representation of different "users" by drawing inspiration from different bird species. Showing an improved birdhouse with multiple rooms draws the focus to the users, rather than the server owners, emphasizing the benefits that premium members would receive.

The spot illustrations would accompany explanations of the feature's specifics, explaining how server owners are able to easily manage perks and create a curated experience for their server members. These concepts continue to reference the birdhouse theme by representing different areas within a server, from activity spaces to markets. The bird theme also allowed for some fun use of symbols, using worms to create a dollar sign and representing member perks as items that birds would like.

Final Illustrations
After receiving feedback, the final hero illustration was finalized without major feedback. Justin assisted with finalizing the hero illustration, building out the majority of the base illustration before returning it to me for edits to color, shape, and adjustment of some details. The spot illustrations were adjusted significantly after receiving feedback, with an entirely new concept being sketched and finalized to more broadly demonstrate the possibilities of premium membership perks without focusing too greatly on rewards or marketplaces. The interior birdhouse illustration was expanded upon to create a more lush interior space.

Misc Spot Illustrations 2022-2023

I produced a large number of one-off spot illustrations during my time at Discord. These illustrations are spread across Discord, living in the app, across the website, in blog posts, event popups, and beyond! This is a selection of some of my favorite small pieces.

Discord Research 2022

The Discord Research server exists as a place for Discord engineers and partners to tinker with code and experiment with feature development. I created this banner for the server to enhance its visual presence and pay honor to the server's importance as a space for developers to contribute to the app and work on projects in direct connection with Discord staff. This illustration highlights the brand character Clyde, who is used to represent developers and Discord's technology. I wanted to demonstrate the joy of collaborating with others in a dedicated space and included a handful of easter eggs referencing Discord's in-app markup language.