Forty drawings that behave like one language

A private commercial bank explaining savings products to people who find banks unwelcoming. Photography was wrong for it: a stock photograph of a smiling family holding keys is the visual language of exactly the institution they were trying not to be.

Forty drawings is a system problem, not a drawing problem

One illustration is a picture. Forty, made over eight months by whoever is free, is a mess unless the rules are set before the first one is drawn.

So the first deliverable was not an illustration. It was a construction grid, a single line weight, a fixed corner radius, and a rule about how figures are cropped. Everything after that was drawn on top of it, which is why the fortieth piece sits next to the first without either looking like the odd one.

The test is boring and it is the only one that matters: put any six of them in a row and nobody should be able to say which was drawn last.

One line weight, and no exceptions

A single stroke weight across forty pieces sounds like a limitation and works as a signature. It is what makes the set recognisable at thumbnail size in an app, where the drawing is forty pixels across and the only thing that survives is the rhythm of the lines.

The temptation is always to thicken the stroke on the small ones. We did not, and instead simplified the small ones until they read at that weight. That is more work and it is the reason the icon set and the editorial pieces look related rather than merely adjacent.

Drawn for the products, not for the brochure

Each piece illustrates a specific thing the bank does: a recurring deposit, a student account, remittance. None of them is decorative. An illustration that could be swapped between two product pages without anybody noticing is an illustration that was not needed.

The pattern is built from the same shapes, so the background of a page and the drawing on it come from one vocabulary rather than from a designer's library.

Handed over as source

Every piece was delivered as a layered vector file with the grid still in it, plus a short usage document: what the line weight is, what the minimum size is, what to do when a new product needs a new drawing. The bank's in-house team has added pieces since, and they still match, which is the only real proof that a system was delivered rather than a folder of artwork.