When I joined Unacademy as a Senior Designer, the illustration system was built around geometric shapes - designed that way intentionally, for flexibility, so non-illustrators on the team could use it. Practical thinking. But over time it hit a ceiling. The style had become saturated - internally overused, visually undifferentiated, and no longer capable of carrying the brand's growing ambition.
Something needed to shift.
Impact
I extended the circle device from Moneyview's visual identity into the campaign — reframing it not as a geometric element but as a glow. Warmth radiating outward. Gold you could step into, not just look at.
The photography direction pushed against fintech convention deliberately — overhead editorial shots, people in motion, natural environments. The circle appears as ground beneath them, as light around them, as the world the product opens up. Green and gold as the palette: brand-consistent but elevated, aspirational without being inaccessible.
The campaign ran across digital and performance formats, with creative variants tracked against channel performance — paid, brand, programmatic, graphic — allowing us to read what was resonating and iterate fast.
What I noticed
Geometric shapes gave the system consistency but no character. Unacademy was an edtech brand — its entire world was educators and students, real people with real energy. The illustration system didn't reflect any of that. It was clean but cold.
I saw an opening: take the geometric foundation, push it toward something with more humanity. Not detailed portraiture — that would break the system's scalability — but characters with enough specificity to feel alive. Educators. Students. People you'd recognise.
What I built
I introduced isometric illustration as the new direction — keeping the geometric DNA but adding dimension, warmth, and a visual language specific to education. I built a bank of educator and student characters: recognisable types, consistent style, flexible enough to appear across every format the brand ran — campaigns, emails, in-app, performance marketing.
The system wasn't just a style guide. It was a production framework — built so the team could generate new illustrations consistently, without everything needing to come back to me.
The clearest proof of the idea working: Unlock20. A vague brief — 20% off on subscriptions, make it feel like a moment. I interrogated what "unlock" actually meant, not just as a word but as a visual — and landed on a keyhole, with "20" peeking through it. Opportunity. Access. A second chance. The concept ran across formats, drove a subscriber jump from 25,000 to 75,000 in a single day, and the campaign template was still being used - with colour variations — after I left.
What actually happened
I was promoted from Senior Designer to Lead Designer during this time, managing a team while continuing to own my illustration direction and performance creative personally. The illustration bank I built became the foundation other designers worked from — not just while I was there, but for years after.
Four years after leaving Unacademy, the visual language I built is still running the brand.
What I took from it
A good illustration style is easy to copy. A system is harder to replace — because a system isn't just about how things look, it's about how a team thinks and works. The goal was never to make beautiful illustrations. It was to build something that could scale without me.
That's still how I think about every creative system I build.