Alexa Developer
Brand Illustrations

01 / SERVICES

ART DIRECTION
ILLUSTRATION
PRODUCTION

The Alexa developer marketing team is the driving force behind developer education, technical evangelism, and thought leadership in the voice design space. I led visual design for Alexa’s global developer communications, including the creation and art direction of marketing illustrations between 2018-2021.

02 / CONTEXT

Project background

As the lead designer, I supported all developer marketing programs and launches by illustrating hundreds of assets used throughout Alexa’s entire developer ecosystem – including the developer portal, Alexa developer social channels, and all developer-facing communications.

Design strategy

I defined style tenets and illustration guidelines to ensure unified brand expression across all Alexa developer touchpoints. I also built and managed an internal illustration library to enable creative self-service, as well as provide vector assets and style guides to support outsourcing needs.

03 / ILLUSTRATION STYLE GUIDE

Color Palette & Stroke

Illustrations prominently use Alexa’s primary brand colors: Alexa Blue, Squid Ink, and White. Secondary colors such as gray, blue, and teal are prioritized when building illustrations, using accent colors to add brightness and contrast when necessary.

Stroke color corresponds with the darker tone of the base color or analogous color.

People

People are built from a customizable base template to create a multitude of characters. To ensure diversity, people are shown in a variety of skin tones, hair colors, genders, and individual characteristics.

Styling & Accessories

Beyond prescribed parameters around skin tone and facial components, creating personality through clothing and accessories is an important (and fun) element to making illustrations feel dynamic and unique.

Devices

Illustrations feature a wide range of devices, including the Echo family and an extended selection of Alexa-enabled devices.

Devices are shown at the most dynamic viewpoint and perspective. Update device illustrations as needed in order show the newest generation of devices.

Developer Themes

Alexa’s developer marketing brand uses stylized illustration to represent developer-centric themes, from simple to complex, in order to resonate with it’s global developer audience.

The brand’s visual langauge relies heavily on illustrative flourish to convey meaning through visual metaphor that is delightful, easy to understand, and close to the product truth.

Use Cases & Scenarios

Illustrations tell the story of Alexa, from development to end-customer experiences, by combining technical components, devices, animated characters, and delightful visual elements.



Individual scenes illustrate the diversity of experiences and added value that Alexa can provide for developers, device makers, and end-customers.

04 / LAUNCH GRAPHICS

ALEXA DEVELOPER PORTAL & SOCIAL CHANNELS

Every product launch, feature release, event, or marketing campaign gets published across all primary Alexa developer touchpoints including:

  • Developer portal homepage hero carousel

  • Developer blog thumbnail + hero image

  • Developer newsletter hero + feature image

  • Alexa developer social card for both X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook

Adapting illustrations to each aspect ratio became part of the production process, which added a layer of complexity to every launch due to the specific sizes and dimensions of individual creative placements. 

06 / OUTCOME

Over the three years I spent on the developer marketing team, I managed to create a robust, unified illustration system to help Alexa’s voice design thought leadership connect, educate, and inspire an entire generation of developers to help build the future of voice with Alexa. 💬

From an operations standpoint, creating and managing this centralized illustration library allowed our small design team to scale our resourcing and capacity planning efforts to meet the growing needs of the larger organization.