In 2020, theSkimm was facing some backlash over its Skimm girl character, the mascot that had represented the brand for its early start-up days.

When we surveyed our users, many were not able to relate to the main character or brand. They saw the overall style as outdated. Our team was tasked to reinvent and mature the Skimm's character and define a style that could also successfully sell branded products in theSkimm's newsletter.

Early iterations of new characters

After experimenting with a few different skin tones, we decided on a palette of natural colors that complimented new brand colors that had recently been defined.

I focused on designing the characters as another teammate developed a background style that would compliment the figures.

I developed these characters to work on our website, alongside our products. For this set we wanted the characters to pop and the backgrounds to fade in order to have them sit naturally on our website.

The array of characters also worked for editorial pieces.

Branded content

Working closely with sales, I developed ads in this style for our daily newsletter. Although they were advertisements, the new style worked to tell a compelling story in a way that didn't feel like an ad.

Impact

In 2021 we sold almost 3 million more in ad revenue after this illustration refresh.

The team

This project would never have been completed without theSkimm design team. Michael Gray was the director of design at the time. Daniel Creel developed the background illustration style and Michelle Rosenthall further worked to extend the library and style after it was developed by myself. Kat Lim, Minhee Kim, Lindsay Lange, and Jacqui McCullough all gave valuable feedback on designs.