We began our long partnership with the fine folks at Good Use — a startup building a global community of giving — at the end of 2019. Initially, we began working with Good Use on crafting a new brand but quickly moved into taking their current brand’s illustration style to new heights. We ended up working with the Good Use team, both in-person and online, for close to a year and created a large volume of illustrations and designs.
The focus of our partnership with Good Use was developing and updating their brand’s illustration style. When we started working with them, they already had an illustration style in place—created by Arek Kajda and Anna Kajda—but the Good Use team wanted to update the illustration style.
So we took the initial style and began to explore how we could inject it with a bit more of the brand's fun and playfulness.
To start, we took some of their most-used illustrations they had and reconstructed them, cleaning them up and seeing where we could make a change for the better.
Once we had the style nailed down in the first couple of illustrations, we began updating all of their illustrations to this style — and there were quite a few!
The end result was an illustration library that the Good Use team could pull from. We also took this exploration and began creating a group of central characters for the stories we told throughout the brand and the campaigns that would follow.
As we worked together, we would create well over a hundred illustrations. We would take the illustration style that we developed for Good Use and continuously tweak it to help it evolve to the brand's needs.
In a partnership with the San Diego Food Bank, we helped Good Use create a campaign to drive users to donate peanut butter — a goal of over 1,000 jars of peanut butter in total. The campaign featured some of the familiar characters we included throughout the brand's illustrations and many different formations of peanut butter— including a pyramid of peanut butter jars. It also sparked an interesting debate both with users and the internal design team on which was better, Chunky or Creamy — personally, we preferred Creamy.
The Good Use marketing team used our illustration style guide to create graphics and ads for Facebook. Even now, the illustrations we created have been turned into fun animations that you can find on the Good Use homepage.
We didn't stop at just illustrations. We worked with Good Use in other capacities, including web design, UI/UX for mobile, graphic design, and strategy. Our partnership was filled with a lot of unique projects and culminated in many spectacular creations.
Throughout our one-year partnership, we created well over a hundred illustrations and touched many different facets of the Good Use brand. We were able to work with some pretty amazing people and help launch their brand and mobile app to help build a community of giving.
For us, working with a brand like Good Use was more than just a design project. It was something we knew would help others, especially those who may be struggling during this rough time in the world's history. Giving back to your community is essential, and Good Use inspired us to give back where and when we can.
Some projects are great to work on, but most never touch your heart the way this one did for us.
We worked with Rocky in a year-long collaboration that took an existing set of illustrations and built them into a system that could grow and expand to meet our needs. The strategic direction and advice he offered were always insightful, and he consistently delivered on time and at a level of quality that exceeded our expectations. We’re looking forward to working with Rocky again.
Brand and Product, Good Use
