Paper Education Company
Paper Pals - Core Brand Design
As part of his work for Paper Education Company, Konstantin spearheaded the redesigns of Paper’s core characters, the “Paper Pals”. The project goals included: Making them more generally appealing and friendly, making them visually distinct from one another in both silhouette and color palette, making their personality traits more visually apparent, making them easier to produce unique poses with in Adobe Illustrator, and designing them for more simplified rigging for animation. Since their updated designs, the Paper Pals have been used in Paper’s marketing campaigns, email newsletters, social media, webpage designs, and internal resources.
Paper Pal - Comic Style Designs
While redesigning the Paper Pals, Konstantin was asked to develop multiple styles for the potential of presenting the different styles to different age groups. This “Comic Style” version of the Paper Pals was designed with an older, high school aged student in mind, and were slightly aged up from their “Core Brand Style” versions. This version of the Paper Pals were designed with an eye toward creating merch, social media posts, and the return of the “Paper Strips” comics that had previously used the original versions of the Paper Pals. The hand drawn style gave room for much more expressive illustrations than the “Core Brand Style” Pals, but with the tradeoff of a more intensive animation process.
Original Paper Pals
When Konstantin first started working with Paper Education Company, he was tasked with creating illustrations using an existing set of characters called the “Paper Pals” that were remnants from a set of animated advertisements previously made for paper. These illustrations were used for comic art, social media posts, event banners, marketing campaigns, and internal resources. While the designs at the time were somewhat flat, Konstantin worked to make the characters as lively and expressive as possible while staying in the existing style, and created props and background scenes to match. Once he became familiar with working with the Paper Pals, Konstantin was eventually tasked with redesigning them entirely, bringing their designs a much needed refresh.
Paper Live
While working with the Creative team at Paper Education Company, Konstantin was put on several projects for the newly developed “Paper Live” program, a series of education live streams targeted toward children learning from home during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Paper Live consisted of several different programs, which the Creative team developed visual brand identities, character designs, and set pieces for, treating each as if it were it’s own unique television program. For his part, Konstantin worked with the head of Paper Live, Brian Swenlin, to create a variety of character assets and backgrounds that would appear in these live streams, developing them to the specifications of each program’s host.
