The creative idea was to raise our schools on a pedestal. We have fought against the fact that it’s near impossible to get great shots of all our schools. Some schools are beautiful and desirable, others are less so. But we wanted to celebrate the fact that these buildings are ours, we’re proud of them and we want our students to share that pride with us.

The creative realisation was that illustration can emphasis the characteristics of our buildings. It can iconify their location, turn the least photogenic building into a credible piece of architecture. They can be romantic, raise their perception and carry the weight of making every school look equally appealing.

We first needed to establish rules base on where these illustration would live. Web components, notebooks, coffee mugs, posters and so fourth; and through exploration, we learn’t flat background colours would blend well with other UI and graphical elements but also retain immersion by implying a time of day and season. We also realised early on how important it was to compositionally centralise the buildings to work well across all our touchpoint and the varying size of each building.

We took the most interesting sections of larger buildings to focus on their individual characters. Retained proportions to give a more considered feeling towards the architecture and removed any visual noise that didn’t compliment the essence of the building.

By now we needed to add diversity to the collection of illustrations by playing with seasonal colours or what was commonly associated with their locales. Glass reflections, common objects, cars or bikes, vegetation and time of day made it enjoyable to explore all the artwork.

Finally, we stretch beyond what photography could do by depicting the nearby lake or ocean, to make traffic look charming and capturing local skyline icons. All while filtering out neighbouring buildings, obstructions and other visual noise.