Paypal M.A.P. Illustrations
A multi month journey into a comprehensive illustration system for an AI small business quiz for PayPal.
I began collaborating in early 2023 with Wildlife Los Angeles, a multidisciplinary agency building interactive campaigns and product launches. PayPal had approached them with a browser based AI quiz that gives customized suggestions for small businesses of varying sizes. There were several illustration briefs per question that would evolve over the development of the tool. The first prompts were illustrate 9 categories of business archetypes, or 9 total classifications with custom suggestions once a user completed the quiz. This would eventually change but it warranted several iterations of composition exploration, with stylistic exploration in tandem. I recruited the help of my talented friend Walter Gerald to assist with the vectors and implementation - he was pivotal in the execution in a timely manner. The final web experience can be found here.
I began by sketching out various archetypes of businesses in varying sizes relating to 3 subcategories: product, commerce, and operations. Each utilized different subtle motifs to signal the scaling of the business but making the overall theme recognizable. Click through the left side for initial sketches, and see the cleaned version on the right.
After a couple weeks of downtown with PayPal, they came back with some updated branding and illustration guidelines. After some revisions back and forth, I ended with more robust character offering - PayPal’s illustration guidelines have a lot of room for various human expressions. The initial feedback on the first round was that they felt too formal, stiff, and tech influenced. The encouragement was to loosen them up a bit and introduce more organic shapes while utilizing some of the elements in the compositions. In essence, re-imagine the characters with a bit more expression.
Click through the left side for the initial sketches, and see the vectorized, SVG optimized version on the right.
In addition to the archetype illustrations, there were several other illustrations that would appear and be animated inside the quiz itself.
Question 1 illustration needed to indicate some level of growth. Originally it was a character climbing a rope, but during one of the rounds all of the character elements were pulled.
Another one of the component questions was a sliding scale of business size - the task was to effectively show businesses of different employee numbers: 0-5 employees, 6-15 employees, and 16-50 employees. Eventually we landed on different sized buildings to communicate this.
Toward the end of the project, the client requested that all characters be pulled out of the scenes I had made. This actually increased the difficulty of the brief, because most of the scenes had characters in them and its what brought the scenes to life. For instance, this bar graph illustration started as a playful stepping stone for some characters, but ended more blandly.
Similarly, the mega janga illustration I made ended up as a pyramid with different symbols. The final pieces required more finesse so as not to appear as clip art!
Other illustrations were more general, but included items like reports, icons, question marks, and more business-related imagery.
One of the questions in the quiz pertains to what kind of business the user is running. There were several categories, but coming up with a hero illustration for each category was paramount to giving the user an impression of fidelity and value as they navigate the rest of the quiz. On the left you’ll find the rough sketch, and on the right the finished vector.
It was a pleasure to work on a multimedia project like this - stretching my contextual thinking and strategic planning so that the illustration system would flex properly within the context of the product. I look forward to more diverse projects like this in the future.