Project brief: Portraits & personas

Faces, faces, and more faces.

One area where I’m surprised to find a lot of work is creating portraits of teams and illustrations for personas. They’re often little projects with a quick turnaround which is why I thought I’d batch them all together into one post.

Persona creation

Creating personas is a big part of Human-Centred Design and many design-thinking project frameworks. Putting a face to each is the usual approach as it helps the audience to empathise more with the persona if it feels like a real person.

Traditionally, you might pull a stock image to depict your personas (where you’ll often start seeing the same faces over and over), or characters from a show (I’ve done Simpsons and Muppets!). Increasingly, agencies are turning towards illustrations to get really personalised and have more control over the final outcome.

This is a fun challenge as you get to create a brand new person and try to give little hints about their life through their styling, their features, or even the things they’re holding.

For example, these personas were from a project depicting customer types of a very hip liquor store chain. Each one needed nods to their different purchasing styles through accessories, clothing, tattoos.

Corporate portraits

To jazz up reports, websites and social posts, I’m often asked to do little portraits of the team in brand colours. I tend to work in a slightly cartoonish style which suits many organisations who prefer something that feels more personal or unique.

Illustrated portraits are a great option to create a consistency of imagery across a website or document, especially if the team don’t have great photos on LinkedIn.

Portraits are hard sometimes!

I’ll admit that I sometimes really struggle to make portraits look like the person they’re supposed to look like. Personas are so much easier because they are made-up humans.

One thing I really struggle with are making teeth look natural. It’s a fine line; you need to have just enough lines to show that there are teeth there, but too many start looking a bit scary.

Check it! Not a tooth in sight.

I’m also usually given reference images that are bland smiles, or sometimes such low quality it’s hard to get details, which can make it hard to create an engaging image.

Things to consider when creating persona imagery

• Avoid stereotypes where possible

• If you’re including markers of diversity, base this as much as possible on research of your target audience so it doesn’t feel tokenistic

• Try to include a surprising or unexpected element to make them feel like a real person

• Lean into unique and odd faces, don’t get stuck creating only people who are young and pretty (unless that’s the brief, like if your client is Mecca or something)

• Try to mix up their posture or stance so that they’re not all just smiling directly at the viewer

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