One of my first projects as design director at Vocabulary.com was to reimagine and dramatically expand our system of achievement badges—these are rewards that students earn as they play different activities on our website.

For this project, I hired a fantastic illustrator from Florida named Mario Jacome (you should hire him too). Mario and I worked very closely, day in and day out, for nearly 9 months building this system. This was an intense, complicated project with many rounds of ideation. In some cases it involved pursuing 5 or more different concepts for an entire category of achievements (each category could be 15 or more badges).

Every student’s profile is represented by a level badge, and these are comprised of fun, ironic, dinstinct characters that we’ve dreamed up and illustrated. Student profiles contain no photos or personal information (other than a first name, if they choose). We strive to protect the personal privacy of our students, who are largely 5th—12th graders.

We kicked off this project by starting with the Level badges: samples are below.