Turo illustration system
When I started at Turo the brand didn’t have an illustration style. There was a need for assets more complex than an icon (all we had at the time) to assist in guiding users through our product and fill out the brand’s visual language.
Throughout this project I defined Turo’s illustration style, built out a flexible system and documented structure & process for ease of style replication. Today the illustration library houses over 500 assets and is growing weekly.
ROLE
System architecture, illustration, documentation
COLLABORATORS
Carolyn Pulvino
YEAR
2019 (ongoing)
Composition
Turo’s illustrations consist of up to 5 composition elements: background, hero, surface, accent lines and accent shapes. Naming these elements has given the brand design team a shared vocabulary, making for easy communication around illustration structure.
The Turo style utilizes a thoughtful mix of fills, strokes and patterns for visual interest and digestibility.
Color
Marketing illustrations have palettes built around vehicle use cases while product palettes use semantic color rules. All palettes contain the brand color, blurple, either as a hero color or accent.
All swatches within these palettes were pulled from a larger library co-created with our systems designer to serve product and marketing needs.
Product palettes
Marketing palettes
Complexity
There are three illustration families in this system: marketing, product, and spots.
Marketing illustrations are generally the largest. They often depict a scene (rather than a stylized object, like most product illustrations) and utilize all composition elements.
Product illustrations have a defined width and height. They have less detail than marketing illustrations and use between 3 and 5 composition elements.
Spot illustrations are the smallest of the bunch, ranging from 64-120px and using 2-4 composition elements.
Illustration families
Spot illustrations
Product illustrations
Diversity
Turo illustrations highlight the company’s vast selection of inventory with depictions of real vehicle makes and models.
They also showcase unique illustrated characters, capturing the diversity of humans that make up Turo’s marketplace.
Design decisions prioritize inclusivity, and aim to strike a balance between being relatable yet aspirational.
