Notability:
Illustration Branding

Character-Driven Art Direction at Scale

Role: Visual Designer (acting Art Director)
Team: Internal Brand Team

When I joined Notability, product adoption was strong and users loved the simple yet powerful UI. However, the company lacked a cohesive visual identity—something necessary to help the business grow and the brand mature.

With a user base made up largely of students, ranging from grade school through university and beyond, I felt Notability was a strong candidate for an illustration-forward identity. The educational space naturally invites imagination, discovery, and play—qualities illustration is uniquely suited to support.

Illustration is often underestimated as a strategic brand tool, especially when character and illustration systems are viewed as purely decorative rather than functional.

I approached this work with a clear set of strategic advantages in mind:

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Emotional Resonance

Characters can reflect, celebrate, and empathize with how users feel—influencing not just individual moments, but their lasting perception of the product.

  • Illustration can be a powerful tool for evoking and reflecting a user's emotions. For Notability, I felt a character-driven approach was the most effective way to achieve that resonance.

    This led to the creation of the "Doobles"—characters designed with a unique, opinionated visual language. Their abstracted, cloud-like bodies evoke thought bubbles, while their expressive faces, hands, and feet reference the ink users create with inside the app. Living within the world of your notes, the Doobles could become anything you might dream up. I designed them to reflect, celebrate, and empathize with how users feel—whether focused, frustrated, or successful. When used intentionally, characters don't just enhance individual moments—they influence how users feel about the product over time.

Signals of Care

Bespoke illustration signals that a product was designed by humans, for humans—communicating care, intention, and quality of craft.

  • Designing with empathy also means signaling to users that a product was designed by humans, for humans. The Doobles introduced a human presence in two ways: through familiar traits—faces, hands, feet, gestures—and through the act of making. These were illustrations clearly drawn, shaped, and considered by a human hand, not generated mechanically. Together, these signals reinforced that Notability was built with attention, care, and thoughtfulness.

Visual Communication:

Illustration can communicate across cultures and languages faster than text alone—particularly for abstract concepts or moments where clarity matters most.

  • As a global product, Notability needed a visual language that could communicate across cultures, languages, and contexts without relying solely on text. Written language often breaks down at scale—text strings expand when translated, and phrases intuitive in one region may lose meaning in another. Illustration offered a way to convey meaning faster and more effectively, particularly for abstract concepts or moments where clarity matters most.

Practical Advantages:

A well-designed illustration system is cost-effective, scalable, and can dynamically adapt to different contexts while maintaining visual consistency.

  • Beyond communication and emotion, illustration offered clear practical benefits. Notability's UI supported custom color theming alongside a core palette for calls to action, errors, and alerts. I designed the system with this flexibility in mind, building a library of over 100 vector illustrations that could dynamically adapt to user-selected themes while maintaining clarity and consistency—efficient to produce, maintain, and extend.

Brand Memorability

Recurring characters create a recognizable presence, strengthening recall and making experiences more compelling to share.

  • Finally, I saw an illustration-forward brand as a way to create experiences that were more memorable, more shareable, and more likely to build lasting recognition—but only if deeply integrated into the product, not applied as surface-level marketing.

    Through recurring use of the Doobles within the product experience, the brand gained a recognizable presence—a literal face to the name Notability. Over time, this repetition strengthened recall, making moments easier to remember and more compelling to share. When users chose to share something from Notability, the visual memory came with it—helping the brand travel naturally through recognition and word of mouth.