One of my passions is making art and design inclusive. I love creating imagery that can resonate with an audience, or even capture and bring awareness for certain groups. During my time, I made social tiles that spotlighted employees and brought awareness about various groups.
Overview
In collaboration with the social team, we had the opportunity to create images that highlighted the cultures and backgrounds of various groups. The goal of the posts was to curate imagery that showcased cultural elements in a meaningful way with our branding. As we continued to evolve our branding, this allowed for more opportunities to create meaningful images for the different months and recognitions.
The first social tile I worked on was for Hispanic Heritage Month. As we continued to evolve our branding, we opted for curated vectors that we could manipulate and change colors. We used stock vector images in several tiles we wanted to display in the posts. While we didn’t get to the point of curating our imagery, it still required us to be intentional and thoughtful about what we used.
Above are some of the other tiles I created with stock vector images and our color guidelines. These were fun to edit and eventually led to the development of our illustration style.
Eventually, we reached a point where we started creating our vector images in alignment with our illustration guidelines. Below I wanted to highlight some of my favorite posts I worked on and created:
MLK Day:
With our guidelines, we hadn’t figured out how we wanted to depict people. That brought unique challenges in some of the posts we had done before. As I worked with my manager on this, I pitched the idea of creating an illustrated portrait of MLK. I explained my background and upbringing learning about his lessons and activism, and wanted to make sure that if we were to do the tile I wanted to do it properly.
After receiving the green light, I went to work on creating the illustrated portrait of Dr. King. In times like these, my background in illustration helped to create a meaningful post highlighting the importance of Dr. King’s activism.
Black History
Month
Before my full-time role, I was introduced to the previous iterations of how we conducted employee spotlights during various historical months. Working with the social team, we wanted a more custom and authentic feel to the highlighted posts we showcased on LinkedIn.
This was another case where I got to do some art direction for how the posts would be shown. For me, I didn’t want to go with cliches we have seen before - I wanted to create a blend of something new while acknowledging the arts. I combined a hybrid of various styles I worked with before to create a new feel for highlighting this month. The turnout? Amazing. I was happy with the final product, and how the imagery worked with our motion graphic on our social channels.
Ramadan
Mubarak
There were a few occasions when we had last-minute requests and quickly brainstormed ideas for posts. I wanted the illustrations to pay homage in the best way possible even though we didn’t have much flexibility. Under the direction of my art director, I created stars, lanterns, and a crescent moon with gradients and glow from references. After some minor touchups, we shared them with social and they shared the images the following week.
What makes this one of my favorite highlights is the comments from the thread. Several employees commented and mentioned just how much this meant that we were observing the holiday and gave praise to the images. Knowing the impact that we were able to have in that post made me proud. It felt great to contribute to a project that continued to strive for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
More Social Tiles I’ve created below:
![Earth Month Social Tile- 1200 x 1200 [V1].png](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65c3e9f94ac09a6c7831658e/e815c3cc-2a1d-4a51-99fc-a3c292d195e1/Earth+Month+Social+Tile-+1200+x+1200+%5BV1%5D.png)
