year

2016

role

Art Director

Team

Tim Lampe
Casey Labatt-Simon
 

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I was brought on to consult as an art director to see through the marketing material for Yik Yak's messaging and chat feature launch. The feature is pretty simple: from a posted Yak you can private message somebody. They wanted to focus on serendipity through messaging. I jumped in and tried to evolve the previous Yik Yak illustration style.

Rough Sketches

I started by throwing a little bit of everything at the canvas. Initially I started with phone mockup illustrations and the path of a message but it felt impersonal. I created a set of characters to build off the previous launch of Yik Yak User Handles. This would be helpful especially because it requires a user to have a handle in order to send a Yik Yak message. 

The Final Illustration

The simplest illustration was the one that came out in the end. I combined elements from a lot of the sketches into the final illustration. The most important thing was being able to sum up the concept in such a small space in the app. The screenshot below shows the illustration in the opening app screen. 

Feature Video

The last part was to put together a feature video for messaging on Yik Yak. I continued the same concept with the characters DJ Skillyrax and TravelLucy. It had to bring across the idea of messaging on Yik Yak, although not show exactly how to use that feature. All art direction was my own, with the animation put together by Casey Labatt Simon. The final video can be seen below.