zulily was turning the big old 7. And having grown so fast they wanted to create a campaign to celebrate their internal employee’s as well as their customers. Copy writers, art directors and designers came and brainstormed we had a ton of great ideas, but Seven Sea’s won since they were turning 7 years old. I was asked to illustrate a fun, happy and bright birthday as well as make it different than any year.
I started out sketching ideas quickly since I only had a few days to come up with the concept. I referenced sea creatures and even watched Finding Nemo a few times to figure out what characters would be best suited for a 7th birthday party. I wanted to make sure these colors were bright and fun so they would be the first things a customer would see on zulily’s homepage. Our designer working on this project thought it would make the project even more memorable if we could cut out the assets with paper, inspired by other paper illustrations.
The placements were designed all digitally first — homepage tiles, event bios, email banner, jump page header, storyboard, event images — each with a desktop, iPad, and iPhone version.
Shanna our designer took the placements and pulled apart all the digital shapes, determined the largest piece that would fit the 12"x12" scrapbook paper, scaled all pieces proportionally, and organized them by color in order to cut them out in groups. It took about 12 hours to cut all the shapes and she ended up with over 330 individual pieces.
It took the team over 8 hours to stylize and photograph each placement!
After the photoshoot, a lot of editing was done to make sure the colors matched the ones in our style guide.
In addition to the creative for the events, we also had time to fit in a few just-for-fun shots for our social media channels and annual birthday party.
Shout out to the amazing team who helped bring this to life.