After months of planning and work, Riskified’s Design Team is excited to reveal our new illustration language. It consists of a bolder style and color palette, and varied skin tones to introduce a more inclusive and whimsical character base.

The characters are more expressive to better connect with the viewer, and unique body proportions make the character feel grounded, just like our brand.

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Why Change?

As a company, we constantly strive to evolve and innovate. This is reflected in the work of the design team, where we explore new ways to tell stories and make information accessible. 

As Riskified designers, we often deal with visualizing complex, technical and abstract concepts. Illustration is a great medium for meeting this challenge and our new visual language gives us the tools to convey our message more effectively.We want to clearly communicate and maintain a level of reliability, but it’s also important for us to stay relatable and engaging. Our goal was to create a stronger, bolder language that would be symbolic on one hand and communicative on the other – to help us tell a better story.

A Creative System

Our awesome design team has many illustrators, each with their unique style and voice. We aimed to develop a system that allows everyone to express their ideas, creativity and vision, while keeping consistency and harmony over time.

The Process

First, we reviewed our current style, noting its challenges and limitations. After we defined our goals, we started to test many different visual styles on two main themes from our day-to-day practice: fraud and eCommerce. The entire design team joined the challenge and we came up with many (MANY) options to choose from.

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After we combined all of our winning elements, we drilled down and tested the nuances: facial expressions, types of hands, color scheme, textures, backgrounds, proportions and composition.

faces

Eventually, after a thorough refinement process, we brought a new language to life, (with a bunch of new characters) and we’re extremely excited to roll it out.