Razorpay: Introducing Illustration Guidelines

PRODUCT ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Razorpay is a fintech platform that is changing the way finance works in India. Most people find finance complicated and impersonal and Razorpay has quite a serious, professional brand language across its products and social media. I worked closely with the design and marketing team to create a series of different “experimental” illustration styles for social media and studied insights about what kind of content and visual styles gain the most traction.

MY ROLE

Ideating new marketing campaigns, creating visuals and videos

THE TEAM

Marketing head and Content writer

MY ROLE

May 2021 - June 2021

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We tried to pin-point our audience with various experiments we ran, and tried to answer the following questions

WHERE TO BEGIN?

We decided to start exploring different visual and story styles to get insights for Razorpay’s audience for emailers, blogs, and social media. 
We tried various storytelling and illustration styles for the first round of experiments, some of them were-

Straight, sharp lines which emphasised strength and boldness

Few geometric elements to maintain the feeling of professionalism

After a number of releases, we didn’t get much attraction with this style, as it didn’t seem very inviting or interesting. Even though the context was there, the feel-good curiosity factor wasn’t.

Curved lines gave a sense of comfort and familiarity. Seemed more friendly with a sense of oneness and community

Character styles with round features to reduce the cognitive load of identifying smaller details of the illustration

We got an overwhemlingly good response to this style. Our posts got 2x views with many more interactions! Maybe it had something to do with the fun style and less text on visuals. We released more product series with the style to get more insights.

Not too funky, not to serious, we thought we found our middle ground

We created illustrations which let our vision reach the audience in clear, short points

We intended to give fun, quick and quirky content to our audience, but it turned out it only did good on Twitter. We suspect it was because people like to have small bites there as opposed to LinkedIn and Facebook, where people don’t mind reading long texts.

Everyday elements with clean lines so they  get more attention to connect the dots

Neutral, genderless characters with minimum details, so the audience can focus more on the storyline!

Even though we were quite proud of the storyline created with these visuals, it didn’t work style wise. Maybe it was too abstract. Maybe people relate more to warm and fun characters more.

Finding the balance between straight line elements and curves

Illustrations adhering to the general anatomy rules. Expressing emotions through gestures and not features

Even though the expressions were missing from our characters, the gestures and elements helped us put across our products more clearly. We tried various other posts to get more insights.

With these experiments we got a better understanding of our target audience. The guidelines are still work in progress and will depend heavily on the re-branding of the brand. Still, this was a research ground work we did!

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