Case Study: Zervice

Hello there, fellow occupants of the planet Druidia. I've not posted a Case Study in quite awhile, so to remedy, here we are today, together, hand in hand, you and I.

Recently I was called upon by PUSH in Orlando, and more specifically Mark Unger, one of the four partners at the agency. Mark and I met in art college in Sarasota and have been friends ever since. I was in his wedding and once cut my foot at his bachelor party at our poolside cabana at Encore in Las Vegas. Later on that afternoon, I overturned a mattress in our suite and shoved my iPhone charger into the bottom of it. Oh, and I was naked. He took a picture. I will never run for office, no.

So, ya know, that was neat. Well, fast forward to late 2012 to find him looking for some illustration help on a project they just got in house at PUSH. He called me up one day when I was fully clothed.

They had an idea for Zervice.com that would require the user to move a Zervice repair van throughout a landscape, effectively ushering them through Zervice's various services. Say that 5 times fast.

The services would be laid out for the user in the form of locations in a graphic landscape, including homes, depots, repair shops, and city buildings. Mark had sold through a concept drawing to Zervice that was really pretty sweet, so I took his lead and built off it.

The angle he had chosen was a bird's eye view, which made sense in order to properly show the Zervice van's journey from point to point. But what this also did was cut out a lot of fun detail from the face of some of the structures, and in time, might lead to confusion when identifying landmarks. If we're strictly looking at this world from a bird's eye view, we'd only be seeing roofs. So, we simply forced the perspective back a bit, shifting the structures to allow for us to take in more of the fronts.

Mark also wanted to use photo real textures on the buildings. Clean and crisp, informative and well-designed, this website revamp for Zervice had to be smart. The style of the illustrations had to feel appropriate for a business that was serious about their business. No cartoony angles or exaggerated shapes, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it wasn't appropriate for this. Style and feel are extremely important in a business's approach to marketing.

All in all I created about 15 structures for PUSH to insert into their flash-based backend structure for Zervice.com, and wouldn't ya know? Speak of the devil and it shall appear. Enjoy these drawings.