Marketing illustration
Crohn's in Childhood Research Association (CICRA) is a charitable organisation set up to support both children suffering from Crohn's disease (and IBD) and their families, as well as secure funds to sponsor research programmes that further the pursuit in tackling these conditions. The organisation's website contains a huge wealth of guides and documentation, and in one space in particular, this information is geared towards a KS2 audience. To help increase the appeal of this information to an audience of this age the Client commissioned me, as part of their business-wide rebrand, to develop a series of illustrated artworks to adorn the relevant web pages and subsequent marketing collateral.
From the project outset the copy for the web pages was in a near complete state, with chapters dedicated to various facets of experiencing and dealing with Crohn's and IBD as a 7-11 year-old. This included discussing how the body and its functions are affected, what a stay at the hospital entails, what medical procedures are carried out, and how home diet and home/school life can be managed. Owing to the sensitive and uncomfortable nature of these topics it was important for me to ensure the artwork was upbeat, and that the narratives were depicted as simply as possible.
As the brand guidelines for CICRA were still under review, allowances for illustrative styling were relatively open to interpretation, which placed me in a fortuitous position to evolve the brand. I opted to model my approach on cues taken from the prescribed iconography styling - sinuous lines of a specific thickness coupled with off-set block colouring to enforce consistency across both design and illustration disciplines.
Another aspect of the brand design I adopted was the recurring use of undulating, curvy lines. I intentionally constructed the elements and compositions of my artwork from bulbous shapes and sweeping curves that not only complimented the brand, but also achieved a sense of motion and flow, making the illustrations more active and engaging. Additionally, where possible, I tried to incorporate a subtle flourish into each of the artworks to enforce the brand further; an extension of the new CICRA family logomark curly line. In most of the illustration you can identify this line styling forming the boundary of some background elements such as clouds, foliage, wiring and more.
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