What if empty states in an app were used to create a world? In the past weeks, I worked with The Network to bring some life to their platform, through handdrawn illustrations.
The goal of the project was adding love to the Network's empty states. These are often dead ends or spaces where something is supposed to happen but hasn't yet: when there are no results, when a folder is empty, when something goes wrong...
The guys at the Network had come across my work on this website and were inspired by the drawings, so they asked me to draw some illustrations for these spaces in their app, to make the platform feel more welcoming and cozy.
I started by exploring different directions. We wanted the drawings to have a common theme and we landed on a village concept: What if we imagined The Network, a place to find people and connect, as a village? From here, we played with the idea of an urban world that meets nature and life.
The illustrations then, represented scenes in this imaginary environment, with the intention to make them feel like moments, hinting a story we don't fully know.
For example, when there are no results ("No people found"), the illustration shows an empty bench and pigeons pecking at crumbs, you'd think there should be someone sitting on the bench, but there isn't.
Or, for when a group has no members in it, the illustrations pictures a swing set with one of the swings still swaying, hinting at the fact that there are people around, but not here right now.
The illustrations needed to do two main things:
Work on their own, fitting the screen or state they're in, and
Working as part of a whole, fitting the theme that was decided at the beginning
The set also included an animated piece for when a chat is loading! One of my favorite of the project!
Like the ones in this website, all illustrations were handdrawn! For this project I used a blue colored pencil to get these rough lines.
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