Hoerbiger Inside Out 2023 Convention Banner

Hoerbigger/SHE holds a annual conference to celebrate their employees. The theme for 2023 was “Good Mental Health” with a heavy influence from Disney‘s Inside Out. I was conscripted to help tie the theming by providing art for a banner and T-shirt.
I was pretty excited because I had worked with them before, and remembered they had a mascot character, SHElia, that could be used for the new design. With that in mind, I got started adapting SHElia portraying all the emotion/characters featured from the movie, Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness. After few sketches, work got started finalizing her designs. Later down the road another depiction was requested, “Care.” That concept was a little more abstract than the others, so it gave me pause at first, but I decided the best way to portray it was with Shelia hugging/holding herself in a moment of self-care.
Now these new characterizations would not be enough, only providing a starting point. The banner was in a long vertical format, so I figured I could stack all the SHElias similar to a fight poster. I also came up with the idea of using emotes as a repeating pattern in the background following the same color coding from the film. Now because of the nebulous nature of “Care” I thought “why not portray that as all the emotions in balance with each other?” so the pattern would reflect that by being composed of all the emotes, and instead of a particular color, it would be white, symbolizing all the emotions combined like how white light is a combination of all color spectrums.
The shirts design would go though several iterations. There were to be designs on both side of the t shirts. Initially I wanted to illustrate all of the emotions emitting from the “Care SHElia.” Over time the concept would be simplified and refined until the front featured the a text blurb of the conferences details, and the back would depict the “Care SHElia” bursting from a rounded yellow window, and the emotes names surrounding the illustration. #illustrator #graphicdesigner