Illustrations and animations are critical to simplifying complex concepts in training, help, guidance, and marketing. But different groups within the company were using different illustration and visual language. Groups without visual designers were using clip art. The Intuit QuickBooks style used by the product team prior to divestiture could not be used anymore.

Quick Base needed an new illustration style that spoke to and supported the brand attributes:

Clean ~ Simple ~ Friendly ~ Empowering

Quick Base had a hodgepodge of illustration style… they ranged from good to off-brand to no-brand. Each department was using whatever resource they could find without any guidance or defined style.

Examples of usage of the Quick Base Illustration Style. The style defines the characteristics and composition of hero images, spot illustrations, fonts, and iconography.

Uses of the style will be in product, help & guidance, marketing and customer communication material, web site, training & e-learning.

We defined the brand promise and how the style must support it. We defined the desired attributes. These would be used in research to understand whether customers responded to the style with the same feeling as we intended to convey.

We had internal and external visual designers iterate through options based on the creative brief. We narrowed and refined during critique sessions..

We tested with existing customers (n=40). We provided 30 randomly ordered words (10 positive, 10 neutral, and 10 negative) and asked respondents to select their top 5.

The results of the chosen style matched 4 of the desired words while garnering no negative words.

New Illustration style used in Quick Base Mobile onboarding

Illustration style used in release notes.