Visualizing Udacity's technical courses
Art Direction, 3D Illustration ✦ 2022Udacity, a market leader in digital upskilling, offers 8 different technology courses for enterprise customers: Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Programming & Development, Autonomous Systems, Cloud Computing, Business, Cybersecurity, and Executive Leadership. For Udacity’s rebrand effort, they wanted to refresh the hero imagery on each of the course landing pages.
However, they only had rough initial concepts that were created in-house by their design team. They needed help developing these concepts into full-fledged imagery. This course imagery needed to accurately represent the technical subjects while also creating a vision of what was possible, inspiring teams to enroll in the courses.
In close collaboration with Udacity’s brand team, I executed on the initial art direction and developed the visuals shown below, from start to finish.
Many thanks to Eric Ruperto for 3D texturing and lighting support on this project.
Art Direction
For each of the landing pages, we wanted to represent the conceptual side of the course content. And we wanted those representations to feel fresh and unique.
To arrive at those fresh and unique representations, we needed to exhaust the obvious answers. In following an iterative process and in working closely with the team’s Creative Director for feedback, we were able to define the visual direction.
Above: some of the iterations explored for the Cybersecurity concept.
Process
To first understand each of the courses, I familiarized myself with the following points:
Who the course is for
What the course teaches
What individuals can accomplish after taking the course
I combed through the courses’ curriculums, the company’s social media, and course marketing. For denser subjects, like artificial intelligence, I researched more broadly in order to understand the underlying concepts, like neural networks. Through this, I could better understand how the course is organized and what specific subtopics are covered.
After presenting multiple options for each concept, I worked with the Creative Director to implement feedback and determine which concept to move forward with for each illustration.
Some concepts were simpler, like the illustration for Programming & Development
Other concepts, like for Artificial Intelligence, required more iteration.
