Family Bell

Role: art director, illustrator, animator

During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, everyone at Google was trying their best to make the world’s lives feel a little bit more normal. The Kid’s team noticed that one of the hardest parts of lockdown was a lack of routine and structure to the days. To remedy this, they partnered with us on the Personality team to create a series of customizable reminders for a wide range of different activities. These included things like bedtime, brushing your teeth, breakfast, and meditation time just to name a few.

After creating a small demo set in-house, we quickly realized we needed agency support if we wanted to scale this at speed. We partnered with Gunner to create the first set of bells; and after their initial success we worked with Hobbes to make an internationalized set to release the feature worldwide.

Early Sketches

The initial brief outlined the visuals should be in a standard Google illustration style, and utilize the company’s four primary colors.

Going For “Glance-able”

Not being a huge fan of “standard” Google illustration, I tried a few options that were a little more playful. I wanted something that could appeal to kids, but that parents would also be happy displaying on their home’s Nest Hub. Most importantly it needed to be “glance-able,” a term we used to describe how easy it was to read something on a smart screen from across the room.

Using imperfect cutout shapes inspired by Matisse and muted color palettes, we landed on this style full chunkiness and charm.

Warm muted colors combined with the imperfect shapes add a level of warmth and humanity to a normally cold digital space.

Scaling up

After finding success in early user research, we got the green light to build a whole series of these timers for all sorts of use cases.

We enlisted the help of Gunner to build out the first series of 8 bells. I provided them with creative briefs, templates, specs, and art direction while they cranked out pure delight.

The first set of bells proved to be big enough hit to take the feature international. Gunner’s sister studio Hobbes helped us out to create the second wave of 16 bells. The primary goal was to create additional bells that were tailored for each region to keep everything feel relevant and inclusive. For example, breakfast looks vastly different depending on where you are in the world and we wanted to accommodate for that.