Google Santa Tracker / Santa's belly

This year once again at Upperquad we have helped Google with the amazing Google Santa Tracker. The site was the FWA Site Of The Day on December 23 and got the “Awwwards” on Christmas eve.

Santa Tracker was already huge from the start, and it is getting bigger and more exciting to work on every year. Not surprisingly, it takes lots of talented folks—from Upperquad, Google and beyond—collaborating to bring it to life.

So this year I got the fun task of designing a style guide to give illustrators and designers working with us some visual references and inspiration when creating new artwork and digital experiences that would be part of the project.

I also worked on the design of two of the many games featured on the 2014 site (more on those to be posted later).

One of the most entertaining steps on creating the style guide was to work with, you know, SANTA!

After a few years of Google Santa Tracker, and many designers and illustrators having created artwork featuring the dude with the white beard, we had to do some organizing.

We had some awesome artwork to work with from past years, like the original style and illustrations from @Ed Nacional and @Glen Jones, and the original designs by Halli (a.k.a. the legendary @Haraldur Thorleifsson). And now, we had the new stuff being created by the awesome @Ariana Nicolay and @Jason Dietrick–who by the way was the art director and main designer for the 2014 site), @Trevor Van Meter and more (like, my little contributions). Plus, the animated awesomeness from @Markus Magnusson and @Seth Eckert. Not to mention the long list of Googlers involved. Since we had several people illustrating Santa, we needed to push for some consistency.

So for the style guide, I created a few diagrams establishing some basic visual references for Santa’s character. This post shows the first of those diagrams. I have to prepare some more shots to post (and definitely add several more names to the list of credits here). For now, here is a diagram showing how chubby Santa really is.