Concept
He and his team wanted to explore the idea of "inclusivity" without getting too far into the weeds about how to broach a very touchy topic visually and do so without offending anyone. Through our discussions, we eventually landed on the idea of exploring inclusivity through the locations where Craft CMS is being used around the world—A “geo” theme incorporating people on computers and local landmarks. The problem was that incorporating any people at all still brought up the specter of dealing with race and gender and all the baggage that comes along with that topic. It needed to be avoided like Coldplay.
The question was how?
The initial idea was to drop any reference to people and focus on landmarks from countries around the world which would have been interesting, but I reasoned that the resulting illustration would have felt more like a travel advertisement than a representation of Craft. The team agreed.
I expanded on the idea exponentially by including famous landmarks, mythical beasts and creatures from folklore, icons, foods, and representative objects from specific countries. You'll also find a random assortment of web and nerd references to help round out the illustration for the tech crowd.
The resulting piece is straight-up fun and successfully represents "inclusivity" (without stepping on any social land mines), pop culture, local culture, and technology.
Process
In the sketches below, you can see all three steps in my process beginning with drawing shapes on tracing paper with a thick marker. Step two is a rough pencil sketch and, finally, cleaning up the line with a tight rendering. For this project, after the concept sketch was approved, the final rendering was done digitally using an iPad with Procreate as well as a Cintiq with Photoshop.