Slack
Editorial Illustrations
Role: Designer
Credits: Alice Bybee as Brand Manager/Art Director. Viet Huynh as my Slack illustration style guide.
Like many B2B SaaS companies, the Slack Blog has been pivotal resource for it’s users and one the the companies primary tools for education and conversion. The blog is a space that allows for deeper dives into focused content, more thorough case studies and a chance to show potential users the breadth of the product offerings beyond workplace chat.
For the year that I was embedded with the in-house team at Slack, contributing to the editorial creative emerged as a space where my history as an illustrator and love of visual metaphor proved to be a complimentary skill for the internal team.
The Slack blog runs the gamut in tone from quirky to educational and the creative content needed to have the same flexibility. Some weeks the creative would be metaphorical with the desire to delight, and other weeks the content would be geared towards educating enterprise clients on the need for IT security precautions. Some creative required a highly technical understanding of the product in order to educate about the nuances of a new product release while other describes the most recent workplace memes.
Each editorial assignment was a little different and my access the the blog draft was dependent on the speed of execution for each campaign. Changes to the features or content could happen at any time and working with this ambiguity became a balancing act between visualizing an idea without making the creative solely reliant on any one word or headline, at risk of it changing.
What made these projects successful in the end relied on a thorough onboarding into the Slack Illustration style, timely feedback from the stakeholders, and an investigative mindset to understand the deeper idea we were trying to communicate without the crutch of simply illustrating a headline.
