Yoojin Seol


associate design director designing and illustrating for

Brands Motion Experiences

Imagine

Work

Role: Art Director & Designer
As the creative lead for the illustration rebrand, I was responsible for the full project lifecycle. 
I began by interpreting the core brand strategy to develop initial concepts.
I presented and iterated on the new style with key stakeholders, ultimately designing and building the final illustration system to serve the entire organization with an accessible Figma library. 

Programs: Figma, C4D, Redshift, Photoshop, Illustrator

Head of Design: Alan Roll
Creative Direction: Susan Payne
Motion Design: Daniel Pragoyo
Web Design: Virginia Van Keuren, Jordan Puga
Created at Airtable.
Airtable Illustration Rebrand

Context
Airtable is a uniquely flexible platform that combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with the power of a database.

Challenge
As the product grew to serve larger, enterprise-level clients, a gap emerged between its friendly, approachable visual identity and its robust capabilities. How could we evolve Airtable’s brand illustrations to reflect its status as a sophisticated solution for the enterprise?

Approach & Goals
Through a new system of brand illustrations, my goals were to:
elevate the brand, shifting the visual perceptions from a simple tool to a powerful, scalable platform
target enterprises, creating designs that resonate with senior decision-makers at large 1k+ companies
visually articulate what Airtable is, and help teams imagine how they can manage complex workflows with interconnected systems on Airtable. 

Success: This rebrand was well-received both internally and to our clients, and rolled out company-wide across web, marketing, product, events, sales decks, emails, socials, and more. 



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1. The challenge: maturing an existing delightful brand Airtable illustrations v1 


Previously, Airtable’s illustration style was colorful, friendly, playful, and revolved around the collaborative interactions of diverse characters.

However, as the company’s go-to-market strategy pivoted to focus on enterprise leaders, a disconnect emerged. 

The existing visual language, while delightful, needed to mature to reflect the product's power and sophistication. Furthermore, the illustrations didn’t connect with how or what the product was. 


    2. Exploring a new visual language

    Airtable illustrations v2
    In my first quarter at Airtable, I dived into learning about Airtable’s marketing strategy, messaging, product, and audiences. 

    In my work, while balancing exploring what the future of Airtable could look like, I created illustrations for ongoing marketing needs. This allowed us to gradually introduce and test new visual concepts, ensuring a smoother transition to our existing audience. 







    What I learned during this interim: 
    We identified that illustration should do more than embellish. 
    Rather, it should:
    • Communicate abstract concepts intuitively
    • Tell compelling stories about the future of work
    • Help audiences visualize possibilities 
    • Generate excitement for a new, innovative way to work 

    Key strategic shifts: To bring these principles to life, I implemented these shifts in the creative direction: 

    • More sophisticated characters: I gave the characters more realistic proportions and facial expressions, allowing for more mature and relatable storytelling.
    • Perspective: I introduced dimension to create more immersive scenes, inviting the audience to envision themselves within new, collaborative workspaces.
    • Connecting brand + product: Abstract shapes became more specific, directly referencing Airtable’s UI and features. 
    Below is the initial brand illustration exploration deck: 









    3. The Rebrand: a scalable 3D illustration system


    The 3D “building blocks” received strong positive feedback internally and externally. With executive buy-in secured, I officially established this 3D style as a new cornerstone of Airtable’s brand illustration. 

    To support this new vision at scale, I created:  

    • A Brand Illustration System designed for scalability: These building blocks illustrations were created with an isometric perspective, so that teammates could easily drag and drop and create on-brand assets without requiring any specialized 3D software. The Brand Guidelines equipped them with guidance for brand consistency. 

    • An accessible illustration Library in Airtable & Figma: This library served as the most updated single source of truth for illustration. This provided our cross-functional partners access to the latest assets with best practices on how to work with our team for bespoke illustrations.

    • 3D Mentorship: As the only 3D artist in the company, I also needed to scale myself. I mentored designers and animators who were new and interested in 3D. This helped unlock a new skill in their career and helped scale our team's output. 

    Below is a sample of the brand illustration system guidelines:






    4. Equipping Sales with the Corporate Pitch Deck 



    Following the launch of the new 3D brand identity, a critical next step was to translate this visual language to sales. The Sales and Customer Enablement teams needed an updated corporate pitch deck to effectively communicate Airtable's value proposition to new enterprise prospects.

    The challenge was to create a compelling, scalable, and on-brand presentation that not only showcased our new illustrations but also told a powerful and cohesive story about Airtable’s capabilities.






    5. Defining AI Launch


    The launch of Airtable AI represented a pivotal moment, and my challenge was to define its visual identity. AI was beginning to be adopted across the tech industry like wildfire, and while there were themes (stars, gradients), many companies were defining AI quite differently (magic, orb, robot). 

    Team Brainstorm
    To begin, I led a team workshop with our brand creative team to brainstorm: 
    What does Airtable AI, as a unique product, look like? 
    What’s our brand POV in visualizing AI in general? 

    I love team brainstorms because they quickly align our whole team to build consensus early. And before I would even develop the final look, my teammates felt included in the process of defining a look that would impact all our work. 

    What we learned and moved forward with:
    Adopt familiar industry cues like purpleish gradients and a four-pointed star for immediate recognition from customers.
    Airtable AI as a prism. What made Airtable AI unique from other AI products was that it took a “single source of truth” dataset on Airtable and refracts it into a spectrum of new possibilities. 

    With the concept set, we identified the key surfaces for the launch, including a new AI landing page, the homepage, executive keynotes, and in-product UI. Then I started designing a cohesive visual system that could be shown consistently across all of these critical touchpoints.



    Promo for a virtual event
    Event promo
    In-product
    for presentations & sales


    All images and videos on this site may not be used for AI training or generation.