To accompany our recent rebrand, we created a bold new art style to carry our brand identity through a series of illustrations representing who we are and what we do. The style needed to be simple, clear, and accessible, as well as represent our inspired, imaginative, and intelligent personality. Ideally, it would also be built to scale up or down, adapt to any size ratio, and work on light or dark backgrounds—and every piece built with animation in mind.

To accompany our recent rebrand, we created a bold new art style to carry our brand identity through a series of illustrations representing who we are and what we do. The style needed to be simple, clear, and accessible, as well as represent our inspired, imaginative, and intelligent personality. Ideally, it would also be built to scale up or down, adapt to any size ratio, and work on light or dark backgrounds—and every piece built with animation in mind.
Animated gif of the Blackbird website mockup scrolling up and down, featuring the new illustrations alongside text.
The Process

The sketches and initial illustrations began as more representational, gradually becoming more abstract as we cut extraneous details down to the most essential imagery needed to convey the concepts. We found that the playful new shapes that emerged by combining and overlaying different geometric elements spoke to our identity as more than the sum of our parts.

Final Style

The art style we arrived at uses our primary brand colors with color blending modes to overlap and intersect the different geometric shapes. As our primary creative medium is the web, these blending modes were specifically designed to work using SVGs, so we can dynamically alter the art for light and dark backgrounds on the fly. The focus on abstract shapes and patterns also means that we can expand, repeat, grow, or shrink them to fill different spaces.