In this week's Behance Adobe Illustrator challenge, I created a template for branded Instagram stories. The goal of this challenge was to create a “kawaii” character. Which is Japanese for cute. Keeping with the Super Diner branding, I went with an orange soda float.

I learned the hot keys “M” for the rectangle tool, and “L” for the Circle tool. Combining those shapes with the shape builder tool “shift + M”, you can build almost any complex shape you can think of. In this case, a friendly looking soda.

I initially started with a rich orange color for the soda, but I wanted to make sure the colors fit with the Super Diner branding. Adding white to the orange made a nice pastel color, which also made it look like it was in the glass. Once the soda was done, I created a cute face to put on the glass. Black eyes jumped out too much, so I matched it to the blue of the glass to unify the color palette even further. And I finished off the float with foam and a straw.

I tried a few different layouts for the template. The first has a large speech bubble front and center to put new announcements into. The second I tried creating a small conversation between two soda’s. I’m not sure how I feel about mirroring the shine effects. I might try to only mirror certain aspects and see if it can look more natural. And lastly I tried placing the soda off to the side to give room for any kind of content in the template.

I also learned you can globally change the background color of your art boards by going into document setup. This can really speed things up so you don’t have to go into each board individually.

Creating cute illustrations is really fun! I want to keep going and see if I can find my style with them.

Super Diner Instagram Stories Template