musiquest
Branded Illustration System
Brand visual identity system to be used for 300+ illustrations
Including story development, brand design, illustration, and animation.
I created a universe of characters and story telling for a kids’ educational music product.
When first approached, the ask was to create some 300-400 unique pieces of artwork. My theory was if I could instead create 10-20 key “golden templates” in addition to a system and set of guidelines, we could have a team of junior designers work on the bulk of things with my overlooking art direction.
The result was fantastic. We built a full way of communicating through this world building exercise. By focusing 80% of our effort on 10% of the work, it trickled down and allowed all art to be developed on budget.
CLIENT
Edify
ANIMATION
Latham Arnott
Final Execution
Full product/interface, website, marketing, and brand/story for MusiQuest. We created documentation to allow the brand to grow through junior level designers with high level guidance from BoneHaus.
An interactive world made for kids musical awakening.
A story and scalable design system for thousands of lessons featuring hundreds of assets, branding, and website.
STYLE DEVELOPMENT
Legacy Library
In order to create artwork for literally hundreds of lessons and quests, we needed a library of semi-modular characters. It was important to strike a balance between overly simple characters that you could swap parts out for (which would be too generic) and giving painstaking detail to every single character (which is not feasible or scalable).
Main Characters
The product has a main story line full of quests to help guide kids to learning about music. These are the main characters of that story.
World Characters
Kids need to see themselves in simple characters with the ability to customize and lean into their musical and stylistic preferences.
Assets
Secondary assets are more structured in their form, but still playful in color in order to allow the main characters to shine.
Quests
Quests are at the core of learning for kids. Think Netflix seasons and episodes where a season is a quest, perhaps “Elements of Music” filled with multiple lessons such as, “Tempo”, “Beat”, and “Rhythm”. There are literally hundreds of quests which all need unique artwork, with the assistance of this entire illustration system.
Gold Quests
Gold Quests are the main story line that are required and carry a very unique and dedicated level of artwork. They tell a clear narrative both artistically and narratively.
Silver Quests
Silver Quests are created in an almost automated way, by choosing various assets from our library of resources and arranging them to a theme; be it water, school, science, etc. There are over 200 of these currently implemented into the site with hundreds more being created.
User Interface
The core design influenced most of the products interface as well, from buttons and call to actions, to the voice and tone while educating kids.
We created interactive and animated interface elements that kids could tactically feel and hear stretch as they put notes into a beat.
MYMELODY
With so many children all over the spectrum of learning, we wanted children that have a difficult time communicating they emotions to be able to have a voice through making music.
From sad and somber music to exciting celebratory, kids are thrilled to have a way to express themselves and feel heard.
Kirk’s brand-building work and artistry transformed our product from a software application into an immersive musical world for kids to visit and explore.
– Jacob Zax, CEO, Edify
