Building an illustration system for millions of passengers…

Cabify is one of the key players in the global transportation revolution, connecting millions of people to better ways of moving around their cities.

Back in 2019, they faced a challenge familiar to many fast-growing companies: a lack of a unified illustration style was causing friction across teams and confusing users. Visual communication felt fragmented, inconsistent and ultimately, inefficient.

That’s when our collaboration began. Since then, we’ve been working side by side to build a flexible, scalable illustration system that brings clarity, personality, and speed to their brand.

The result? Stronger internal alignment, smoother product experiences, and a brand that speaks visually with confidence and consistency at scale.

We dove deep into the product in order to learn about the company’s values, the team, its procedures, the market, its customers, and its business objectives.

This first phase is essential. The better we know the context of the company, the better we’ll know how to represent its essence and the more unique the result will be.

Once we had gathered all the information, we made a visual moodboard with references and inspirations, which helped us find the tone and outline the first set of ideas.

After several months of exploration, iteration and meticulous teamwork, we defined the bases of this great puzzle. The premises were simple: consistency, scalability and personality. Getting it all together was a great challenge.

Scalable From 40 pixels to 40 feets or ∞.

Sizes With a real sizing system.

Scenes One place, different characters.

Style Move principle as a base using lines & geometry

Characters True diversity. Same core for a wide range of persons.

Vehicles The keystone of the project, we had to redesign the look of their 4 wheels vehicles, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, trains and even helicopters.

Library Easy-to-use elements for the entire team, and we advised other departments in the escalation process, such as Product, Marketing, International...

For an illustration system to work, all of its parts must be easy to use by all team members, and on any medium. All the illustrations are delivered in vector and bitmap formats.

Figma is the main tool that the Cabify’s design team works with. Once the pieces have been exported, we work closely with the team to include them as one more component of their design system.

Once the system is completed and the elements can be played with by combining and applying them in different ways in both digital and physical environments, we continue creating ad-hoc pieces that enrich the library and grow the collection with scenes, pictograms, high-quality illustrations. format or social media pieces.

– Carlos Tallón, VP of Design Cabify