Role

Brand development | Illustration | Block printing | T-shirt design

Context

During Twilio's 2019 company kickoff, our CEO Jeff Lawson compared the company taking on challenges, to battling monsters. That stuck with me visually, so when I had the opportunity to brand our annual hackathon – Tweek, I decided to bring those monsters to life.

Process

Inspired by Japanese woodcut prints and kaiju, I explored hand carved rubber stamps as a more approachable medium.

I had no experience with stamp carving, so I had my sister who has dabbled in the craft show me the basics. I knew I wouldn’t have the time, or be given a budget to create the entire posters by hand so I only carved certain repeating elements.

The more detail heavy visuals I drew by hand, mimicking the more angled lines that I had created in the carved stamps as much as I could.

In the final step I digitized both the rubber stamps and the illustrations and compiled them into five posters to represent five challenges.

Posters

Scalability
This expanding and scaley monster is scalability, but as we know the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Legacy
This tentacled ancient monster and its stubborn suction cups is legacy, but it is what it is and has no plans of changing.

Regulations
This defensive giant monster is regulations, so you better watch yourself before you wreck yourself.

Networks
This tangled messed of a monster is networks, untangling this disarray is a change that can be a very slow process.

Channels
This multi headed monster is channels, but for some reason when we cut off one head, more always seems to take its place.

Digital displays

There were lots of cork boards and frames for my team and I to put up the posters, but there were event more digital displays in the office.

With the same five monsters, I designed a series of animations to match the posters.

Chibi Kaiju

For hackathon swag like t-shirts and stickers, I had a more fun and “chibi-fied” the monsters, then pit them against each other. I really enjoyed designing the monsters fighting, so much so that I created a visual for each monster fighting another, so 25 total!