July 18, 2025
Project Background
This project was completed for my college Iconography course. The goal was to design a cohesive illustration system for Pomegranate Travel, a modern travel app brand. The system was built with consistency and scalability in mind, and includes a full range of assets, such as icons, pictograms, spot illustrations, and hero illustrations, which were designed to work seamlessly across the product.
Role / Context
Design Systems, Illustration, Product Design
Timeline
Aug 2025 - Dec 2025
Moodboards
To establish a style direction, I first explored multiple moodboards and style sketches (next page). Each option was intentionally distinct, to emphasize its core traits and enable clearer decision-making.
Koko
This direction uses cool colors, flat coloring, minimal line work, and organic shapes to evoke the essence of travel: freedom, nature, and a sense of calm.
Yuki
This direction amplifies the brand through bold red hues, diffuse shading, and geometric forms to draw inspiration from Pomegranate’s “fruit” identity.
Direction
Koko was the winning style over Yuki as the final direction because it more effectively captures the inspiration associated with travel. Its cool color palette evokes calmness, nature, and freedom, while the round, bubbly organic shape language feels inviting, which can give the user a sense of comfort when using the app for their travel needs.
Additionally, its iconography is more immediately recognizable at a glance, and the cool toned “easy-on-the-eyes” color palette better supports an enjoyable product experience.
Metaphors
Next, I explored visual metaphors to guide our illustrations. In a product context, effective illustration communicates meaning quickly and clearly, which allows users to easily understand the subject without additional explanation.
Below are samples of the first iterations of this pictogram set I made to demonstrate how metaphors can be explored at varying levels of complexity, from straightforward concepts to more nuanced interpretations. I marked the ones that we chose as the most effective metaphors.
Technical Iteration & Exploration
Iterations can involve subtle changes in shape or style for the same metaphor, or experimenting with alternative color schemes. For this project, favored iterations of icons were clear and functional while larger illustrations were picked for style cohesiveness or brand faithfulness. Technical iteration ensures illustrations work reliably across all product contexts. It helps maintain consistency, scalability, and usability while catching issues early in the design system.
For icons, we opted for iterations that were most easily understood at a glance, for effective communication.
For pictograms, we opted for iterations that kept the color palette most consistently distributed,
for style cohesiveness. Roughly 50% mint, 25% green, 25% other colors like accents.
For spots and heroes, we opted for flat colored iterations which captured the inspiration from our moodboards best.
Brand guide
Names & Asset Formatting
Icons
Pictograms
Spot Illustrations
Hero Illustrations
Screens
Conclusion
If I had more time, I would do XYZ….
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