Calendars
Illustration
Onboarding
UI design
About the project
In 2022 Readdle was releasing Calendars as a new desktop product — a personal assistant for managing time, aimed at a global audience from day one. A new product means users arrive with no relationship to the brand and no reason to trust it yet, and the first minutes of the experience are where they decide whether to stay. The task was to build a simple, clean illustration system that carried the delightful, calm feeling of the product itself, worked across an international user base, and was flexible enough to cover every surface of the app — onboarding, empty states, product metaphors, marketing — without collapsing into decoration.
Design Process: characters
Introducing characters into the illustration system was the way to break the emotional "ice" at the very beginning of the customer experience. The work started with briefing the Calendars product team and gathering ideas directly from customers, so the characters reflected real user motivations rather than generic stock optimism. From there came colour research — testing full-colour palettes across a walking character to find the right emotional temperature — followed by style research that moved from flat colour toward a lighter, mostly line-based treatment. Four texture patterns were explored, and the final style landed on outline characters with grey noise shading, a small accent palette, and floating background elements.
Design Process: world
Characters are emotional and inspirational, which makes them the wrong tool in places where they would pull attention away from the information the user needs. For those cases the system uses non-live objects as product metaphors — calendars, hourglasses, task lists, notes. Each was sketched by hand first, then refined into the final line style with the same accent colours and background elements. With the emotional groundwork in place, the illustrations were put to work across the onboarding sequence — welcome, goal selection, working hours and planning time, the three-step "master your time" explainer, account creation, connecting calendars, and syncing tasks. Each screen pairs a single illustration with one clear decision, so setup feels like a conversation rather than a form.
Building a system
The system was written down so it could be extended by others: main line 3 px, secondary elements 2 px, dense noisy shadow from a defined brush, grey t-shirt pattern, grey ground shadow; coloured objects carry no outline and only slight perspective and volume; background crosses and squares use 5 px rounding and take colour, leaves stay as line. A full light and dark mode colour system defines pattern, stroke, skin and background values.count creation, connecting calendars, and syncing tasks. Each screen pairs a single illustration with one clear decision, so setup feels like a conversation rather than a form.
Role & Results
A complete, documented illustration system for a brand-new desktop product — characters, objects, background elements, empty states and a full light/dark colour system — shipped as part of the Calendars activation flow. Throughout this amazing project I was collaborating with a team of talented individuals: an illustrator Irene Neyman, product designers Oleg Sukhorukov and Alex Khomutov. Would you like to learn more about this project? Read the full case and see more illustrations on Behance: https://www.behance.net/gallery/151022887/Calendars-App-Illustration-Design-System-Project?platform=direct