Client
General Items
Role
Illustration & Motion Designer
Team
Koyal Raheja, Art Director
Sector
Retail · Craft & Design
Scope
Hero, illustration set, animation & overlays
Overview

General Items sells objects that bring joy through utility. It had a logo and nothing else: no visual language for the web, and a homepage like any other small store. The hero had to say what kind of shop this is before anyone scrolls, and be worth describing to someone afterwards. I was responsible for the illustration and motion graphics, with art direction support from Koyal Raheja.

What we tried first

Two directions came first. Photographed products on a graph-paper grid: it needed every new product shot to one standard, and looked like every other good shop. The shop drawn literally, facade and windows: too literal, static, redrawn each time the catalogue changed. Neither survived, but the letter-grid drawn for one of them became the MENU and INFO panels.

Early direction: photographed products on a graph-paper grid with plus hotspots
Photography on a grid. Every product needed a shoot to the same standard.
Early direction: products framed in shop windows
Windows and shelves. A fixed composition the catalogue kept outgrowing.
Early direction: an elevation drawing of a shopfront
The shop, drawn literally. A metaphor to decode before you can use the page.
Illustration

Rather than invent a style, I grew everything from the one asset the brand had. The logo’s diamond is the unit: tile it for the ground plane, stack it for an object. Nine objects, one per product family, share that grid, one light direction and a cream ground with accents of red, blue and green, so nine different forms still read as one family.

The goblet as a product photograph
01The reference. A product photograph, nothing else to work from.
The goblet redrawn on the tiled diamond grid
02On the grid. The logo’s diamond, tiled, sets every angle and edge.
03Grid removed. The geometry stays, and the object reads on its own.
Motion

Each object loops on its own rhythm, a bounce or a spin or a settle, tuned so nothing moves in lockstep. Nine loops on one homepage is a weight problem before it is a design one, and that shaped the animation: short cycles, invisible seams, and a decision about what needs to move on load.

Interface

The hero is atmosphere, so navigation had to be unmistakable. MENU and INFO drop a full-screen red panel over the world: categories as a monospaced letter-grid, the craft story opposite. Full-bleed rather than a dropdown, because a small catalogue reads as more considered given the whole screen, and closing it returns you exactly where you were.

Handoff, and where it went

Most of the real work was the handoff: loops that cycle invisibly, deciding what loads when so nine files can share a page, and a spec of grid positions and timing offsets a developer could build from without me. The hero is live, and the system outgrew it. The diamond now runs across packaging, social and the shop itself, extended by the team.