Shaping the look of online education

André Cândido

Art Director

Brand Designer

Graphic Designer

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe InDesign

Figma

With a clear vision to establish SuperHi as the go-to online destination to learn new creative skills, I crafted a unique and flexible illustration style that can scale as the company grows.

Image for the Foundation HTML, CSS + Javascript course.

Design challenge

SuperHi is an online education platform and a global community of creative learners from 80+ countries around the world. They started out as a code school, and have grown to teach so much more.

With the natural foray into teaching new creative disciplines and skills, the need for course imagery was ever-present. SuperHi needed a system to create their course images, that was flexible, scalable and instantly recognisable.

A second challenge was, of course, to explore how the new course imagery direction could impact and transform the look and feel of SuperHi's brand across its multiple touch points (the marketing site, the student experience, social media, paid ads).

Image for the Visual Design + Branding course.

Design Solutions

Looking deeply into our courses, there were two defining attributes that stood out as common across the entire SuperHi catalog: their subject and level of difficulty.

With this insight, I created a layered approach for each course image.

The possible backgrounds for each course, based on their discipline and difficulty level.

The possible shapes and patterns used across all images.

The quantity and scale of the shapes reinforces the difficulty level of the course.

The possible decorative elements used on the foreground layer of each image. The bar-like elements inspired by loading states, paper folds and paper trimmings are specific to each discipline.

The course images

Check the link on the bottom of the page to see the video.

The website

Revamped homepage for SuperHi

Courses page with updated imagery

Each illustration is used as a background in the hero section of the respective course page.

The guides

The First Steps guides are a lead generation and sales funnel content project. Their intent is to introduce people to SuperHi and their three main skill pillars, in a way that's approachable, real, fun and practical, with a lens on helping people make and use these skills, no matter what role or career path they have or wish to have. These guides can be read online or saved as a downloadable pdf.

Visually, each guide builds on the corresponding course hero image, expanding the overall system.

Each chapter opening illustration uses the quantity of shapes to represent the chapter number.

André displayed great attention to detail throughout the entire process, and was able to effectively align the content with our new SuperHi brand and marketing site, which he also creative directed. He's an incisive and talented designer with not only an eye for detail and the skill to take any brief and make something with it, but the ability to think from the big picture and approach projects contextually and within fast-paced startup environments.

Ana Wang Former Head of Content at SuperHi  and author of the guides mentioned above.

Inside the PDF of the "First Steps to Learning Project Management"

Credits

Course Artwork Art Direction+ Design: André Cândido

Marketing Website Art Direction: André Cândido Product Design: James Shedden Development: Chris Lawrence

First Steps to Learning Guides Author: Ana Wang Art Direction+ Design: André Cândido

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As SuperHi's designer and art director, I led the brand refresh by building a new visual and brand system – encompassing the marketing site and other collateral

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Clients

SuperHi