Adslot research
The Adslot marketplace connects large Advertising agencies and their clients to premium hand-picked audiences provided by some of the largest publishers in the world. This project allowed us to pilot a new graphic design direction for not only the marketplace but also Adslot’s wider marketing and brand direction.
Problems we were trying to solve
Current graphic design in the marketplace and in Adslot’s wider marketing caused the platform to look dated when compared to other online platforms of similar size and direction.
The illustration was growing naturally within the product but the growth was beginning to cause an incoherent style from page to page and product to product.
Marketplace categories lacked continuity and scalability. Using the current graphic design direction, we aimed to create a coherent illustration style that could be used across the entire platform as well as giving us flexibility in a constantly changing marketplace.
Initial sketches
With a general style now in mind I begin roughly sketching the larger scenes to get an understanding of the scope and how we might translate feelings and messages to users. I experimented with both content and style rapidly moving through iterations and getting a feel for what would or would not work for our product. These were continually shared amongst the teams to get an understanding as to how they were responding to them.
Empty state and small illustration study
In the long term our illustration style would ideally handle not just larger scenes but also smaller messages. For this reason I did a study of mini illustrations to cover how we might take a single “hand” motif and apply it to varying empty states within the product. We explored a range of options from icons through to medium sized scenes.
Marketplace Illustrations
After exploring and understanding our own style and experimenting with it in a variety of common scenarios we compared it to a range of existing libraries looking for something that would provide us a solid base to work from but give us the flexibility we would need for a changing marketplace and brand.
Final Marketplace categories
Below are our final marketplace category illustrations. The library we chose allowed us the flexibility to create varying sales categories. Its similarity to our original concept sketches meant we could further build out the library where necessary when assets were not available. This approach suited our team size and the amount of time we could dedicate to this kind of work.
