Project Brief: Spectrum

An asylum seeker & migrant resource centre

This project landed just after I took the plunge into freelance illustration and came via my last full-time employer, Local Peoples. I’ve been freelancing ever since leaving there in 2020.

The team at Spectrum are a multi-cultural team providing social services to new migrants and refugees in Melbourne since 1980. Their staff come from over 50 different countries and speak more than 30 languages.

The diversity of both staff and clients was something that the team wanted to depict in their annual report. They wanted some friendly illustrations to pepper throughout to give it a bit of colour and life.

Depicting diversity

A key part of the brief was depicting the sheer diversity of the people that Spectrum work with throughout the year. Young babies, teens, people living with disability, older folk, people of different faiths and cultures.

I tried to pull from the migration trends that we’d discussed as a team; for example, the older man and woman have a bit of a Mediterranean vibe, as there was a big wave of immigration in the 1940-60s to Australia from countries like Italy, Greece, and Macedonia. I showed markers of faith, such as hijabs and turbans, and visible disability such as hearing impairment, wheelchair and walking aid use.

One area of diversity that I often see underrepresented is body size and age. I made sure to include people with larger bodies and people from toddler through to pensioner.

Jazzing up the dull stuff

One area where illustration can really work its magic is in the more ‘dull’ areas of a report or document. Sprinkling little icons throughout the report, including on spreadsheets and numerical pages, helped to create a bit of visual interest on visually un-interesting pages.

Little details like arrows or hands can also help guide a reader through a dense document, highlighting important information and helping to craft a story.

I created a series of icons, hand gestures and symbols for the graphic designer to pull from which complemented the characters.

Using new tech

On this project, I was jumping feet first into a commercial illustration project without much of a process or understanding of what was industry standard. I’d purchased an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and the drawing platform Procreate. I had to figure out how to work in layers, sizing, colour settings on the fly.

Luckily the designer was happy with what I delivered and easily picked up the illustrations from the supplied files to drop into the report. Since then I’ve refined my process, but a lot of it is learning on the job and spending much more time than I’ve quoted doing things over because I haven’t done them in the best way.

Still, this was a smooth project, and a fun one to work on. I enjoy coming up with characters and giving them little backstories in my head, and these characters are all out there living their best multi-cultural/multi-faith/multi-generational lives!

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