Highbrow • Philipa Rabbit

CREATIVE LEARNING

Highbrow

I was approached by Highbrow to help them design their app and create a place for children to safely explore the ideas they love and learn skills to help them grow. I had the amazing opportunity to work across different aspects like UI Design, Illustration and even animating the splash-screen.

The Starting Point

Highbrow is a curated, ad-free world of media content for children. Their ethos is based on the fact that nowadays young ones live in a world where digital media has the power to shape minds and behavior. It's their core belief that it’s important to make the child’s screen time positive and enriching.

My starting point for this project was the Highbrow owl. Knowing that I needed to use this character I wanted to create an environment that could connect both the character and the learning safe space. The natural route was having a forest and a treehouse. But, because these are very familiar concepts for an owl environment, I wanted it to have a twist. So I decided that inside the treehouse we would see a messy 'kid' room, where inevitably most of the self-learning and curiosity occurred. The room ended up being the homepage, and the objects worked as buttons for the different pages across the app.

Concept Sketches

Final concept for the app homepage

UI Design

After some discussions with Highbrow about the overall map of the user experience journey and with the concept for the homepage signed off, I then designed all the different pages across the journey. At the same time, I also illustrated all the assets necessary, such as the different spot illustrations for the language options.

UI Design of the different pages accross the app

For the language options page, the main character was dressed and accessorized according to the corresponding country.

Illustration and Animation

For the app splash screen animation, I proposed exploring the forest and treehouse. This would create a context for what we end up seeing on the app homepage. I illustrated all the assets needed and animated everything in After Effects with the exception of the flying owl, which I animated frame by frame to achieve a more smooth and realistic look to the movement.