my work:
1000faces
creating a brand for unique people illustrations and making them publicly accessible
May 2021, personal project
How it all began.
In May 2021, I made a creative scrapbook as a present, which included this page. I also sent the picture of that page to other friends to see who their “10 people” were. Unexpectedly, everyone was more interested in the drawings than in the question. My mom asked me to make ones of the family so she could hang them up.
My friends’ reactions got me thinking about digitalizing my work and offering it for downloads.
Restrictions.
I am not yet in possession of an iPad or other device that would allow me to sketch on a screen. This meant, my sketches would have to be made on paper and then digitalized.
At the starting point of this project, I didn’t have any experience with Squarespace as I had previously worked with Wix.
My Role.
User Researcher, Illustrator, UI Designer
The Backstory.
I have been sketching faces my whole life. When I was about seven, I made a “choir” - a collection of DIN A 5 sheets that each showed a big face with the mouth wide open. There were black people, redheads, people with rabbit teeth, braces or no more teeth; kids, punks, and I think even vampires.
In school, I was bored a lot, and during the whole time, whatever pen I was holding, automatically drew faces. Over and over. Eyes-nose-mouth-jaw-ears-hair-neck. Nose-eyes-mouth-ears-jaw-neck-hair. Over and over. Until graduation.
Speaking of graduation, during my final exams, I won an art prize for... guess what? An acrylic portrait (=face), an expressive sketch (of a face), non-finito-sketches (of bodies and faces) and a photo series exploring societal roles (collection of faces).
The Scale.
Personal project, ca. 12h of work per week
My Primary Audience.
Designers, content creators, companies who want to enhance their branding or certain deliverables and are looking for a unique, humane and minimalistic style
Tools.
Pen and Paper, Inkspace, Figma, Gumroad, Hootsuite.
The Process.
Working around stuff.
1 Inkscape
After some research and some frustrating afternoons using tools which, for example, allowed me to vectorize images only up to a certain file size - I was ready to give up and pay for Photoshop or Illustrator. Then I stumbled across Inkscape, a digitalizing tool. It did the job perfectly! I used Inkscape’s documentation to teach myself how to trace the lines from the photo of my sketch.
The result was a beautiful SVG that I could also export as PNG. This was exactly what I wanted.
(SVGs are scalable, so they don’t become pixel-y when zooming in.)
REFINING IN FIGMA: ON WHITE BACKGROUND THE FACE IS SMALLER IN PROPORTION TO THE FRAME.
RUNNING MY PHOTOS THROUGH INKSCAPE - BEFORE AND AFTER
2 Figma
Next, I imported all my files into Figma an organized them onto Frames. Why?
So that I could collect everything in one place for better overview.
So that I could adapt the size of the face on the frame - this way all the proportions would be even and if someone places many faces together, none of them would look like giants or dwarves.
So that I could design each of them with white as well as transparent background (see image on the left).
So that I could neatly label them by their names and frame background.
So that I could easily duplicate them onto different collages for posts, marketing or the website.
I am quite agile in Figma, as I’ve been working with it a lot. Nonetheless, it took me a full work day tp complete this step.
REFINING IN FIGMA: MAKING COLLAGES FOR MARKETING.
3 Gumroad
In the end, I exported all labelled PNGs from Figma and packed them up in ZIP-files. I created a product page on Gumroad and uploaded them there.
Gumroad allows customers to purchase a product using Paypal. A link on any other page can lead out to Gumroad to let the customer easily pay for the content and get access.
I had used Gumroad before to share worksheets I made for the Diamond Mind Project, as well as to share hand-designed Notion dividers.
If you’re interested, take a peek at my Gumroad uploads:
BUILDING IN SQUARESPACE
4 Building a Website in Squarespace
I then spent some time building a website on Squarespace. It didn’t have to be very complex - a landing page with all necessary information and CTA’s leading to Gumroad would in fact be enough.
It still took me a pretty long time to build, because I was working with Squarespace for the first time. Although I find that Squarespace has high learnability, I simply couldn’t yet work quite intuitively.
5 Marketing Automation with Hootsuite
I decided to use Twitter for my posts, using the #buildinpublic. After I had set up a Twitter page for my illustrations (@1000faces_) that led to my website, I signed up on Hootsuite, a webapp that allowed me to schedule social media post. Even though it’s not for free and I won’t be charging money for my faces at first, it seemed to me that Hootsuite is high-leverage on the long term. It also enables me to coordinate posts on various social media channels. Once I have even more traction, Hootsuite would be good to keep people on different platforms up to date about my work and to keep posting regularly without spending lots of time on social media every day.
I scheduled the first week of posts and described the challenge. Each post got a status, starting at “1/1000”.
SCHEDULING A POST IN HOOTSUITE
6 Keeping Track in Notion
But - how do I know which faces I’ve already posted on Twitter? With the number of illustrations growing, it became compulsory to set up some sort of overview over all my illustrations, allowing me to label them by the “pack” they belong to as well as tick them off as “scheduled”.
1000 faces in one year??
Setting a challenge
“So, what now - `1000 faces` or `100 faces`?” I was in the subway with a friend and decided to consult him about my brand name. “Athousand faces sounds so much more radiant and impressive”, I said. “But then when people read the brand name `1000 faces`, and then they scroll down, and all I actually have is a pack of 38 faces and 12 monsters... Seems kind of pathetic to me.”
This was when the idea of the challenge came up. My friend showed me designers on Twitter who build in public and post drafts and pieces of work along the way. One person was posting an illustration each day and had set himself the challenge to do this for 365 days.
“You should do something like that”, my friend said. “I’m gonna make 1000 illustrations in one year”, I said. “then I get to keep the more shiny name.” He laughed. “Imagine how good they will be in the end.”
Custom Illustrations.
After I had showcased my illustrations on some channels, a reddit member reached out to me to ask if I could make a custom illustration for him so he could use it as a profile picture.
I was, of course, happy to do that for him! I had only ever made custom illustrations for friends and family, so I was super curious to see if he would be content with the result. (Lucky enough, he was.)
I had thought about offering custom illustrations all along. My website has a button linking to my Mixmax booking page, which allowed users to easily book a 30-minute call with me called “Prep Call Custom Illustration”. (Mixmax is a scheduling platform like Calendly.)
Hopefully, this is just the first of many custom illustrations...
I love humans, and drawing them can work as an outlet for that.
CUSTOM ILLUSTRATION - UNDERSTANDING A FACE
MY FIRST “CLIENT” CUSTOM ILLUSTRATION
Next challenges.
My next steps are to improve the line quality of my illustrations.
Although my results with Inkspace are alright, the lines don’t look pixel perfect and you can tell they were hand-drawn. It’s a style, I guess…? But I’ve received the feedback that I can still improve in this metric.
My strategy will be to use Figma plugins to smoothen the lines and if that doesn’t work, consider getting Photoshop. On the long term I will get an iPad; I think this will improve efficiency in my workflow as well as the quality of my illustrations.
THE LINE QUALITY STILL SHOWS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
TRYING OUT THE FIGMA PLUGIN “SIMPLIFY”.
Coming up next.
MORE FACES - I WILL CONTINUE TO CREATE AND TRY TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY AND UNIQUE STYLE OF MY ILLUSTRATIONS.