We’re always excited to see what the talented team at Creative Market comes up with for a fresh round of custom Scout Books. Based in San Francisco, CA, Creative Market is an online marketplace for digital design assets. They were founded in 2012 with a mission is to help creatives quickly turn passion into opportunity using their tools.
Their recent project was a series of four Pocket Scout Books, each featuring a charming critter illustration, unique ink color, and punny name. According to brand designer Bronwyn Gruet, who created these sweet designs, the illustrations started as doodles on paper. They were brought into Illustrator to get vectorized, and there they added a pop of color and pattern for texture. Creative Market thanks its community by mailing out unexpected “Random Acts of Delight” to members (we love this) – these notebooks will be used as those thank yous, and as special treats for staff. They’ve also brought past projects to SXSW to hand out as a giveaway.
Bronwyn was kind enough to answer a few of our questions:
What was the initial concept behind this series? How did the charming historical references get developed?
Our marketplace houses such a diverse range of products – photos, graphics, templates, themes, fonts, add-ons, and 3D. We wanted to make a set of notebooks that could represent all of those disciplines, so we came up with the concept of creating character illustrations that could embody all the different types of creators in our community. After drawing up these critters, it just felt right to give them names. We thought up a list of historical figures that were creators, and based our pun-derful names on them.
Was there anything unique or challenging about designing for the Scout Books format?
It’s such a fun challenge to try and find ways for the inks on Scout Books to interact with each other and with the chipboard canvas. I really enjoyed the process of thinking through ways to give dimension to these illustrations using flat color, line work and patterns, and using the chipboard material as negative space. Scout Books’ pocket notebooks feel like the perfect canvas for little illustrations like these!