Illustration principles

Background

It’s a classic dilemma in large organisations: you need illustrations, but you don’t want to depend on a single illustrator.

Photography doesn’t solve it, productions using staff as models age quickly because people leave, and situations change. Professional models are expensive, and stock looks like stock. Graphics and data work well where precision matters, but they’re cold, and they don’t carry the warmth Nav needs when meeting people in difficult life situations.

The answer was to define a set of principles, the character, not the hand.

The principles

The line should feel human: naturalistic, not caricatured. Ideas should surface subtly, through composition and choice of situation, not through explanatory arrows and callouts. There should be no humour, but no heaviness either. If someone smiles slightly, that’s a bonus, not a problem. And colours should always come from Nav’s own system.

Simple enough to brief a new illustrator on. Clear enough to maintain a coherent expression across very different contexts.

In practice

Mangfold i Mai 2022
The trap here was obvious: diversity as a topic is surrounded by clichés. Rainbow stock, perfect representation groups, and cheerful diversity. What we needed was something that showed genuine human breadth: different ethnicities, ages, abilities, and gender expressions. Without it becoming a checklist in political correctness.

The result is a group of people in motion. No one is iconified to represent a category. The wheelchair is present without dominating the image, and the guide dog (see full illustration further down) is there without becoming the point. Diversity shown, not performed. Illustrations: Gilles and Cecilie.

User experience principles
Nav had nine principles for user experience (before we got our own department in 2025), rooted in the organisation’s vision: “We give people opportunities.” Four of them describe the experience Nav promises its users: trust and opportunity, being met on your own terms, Nav as a support, being included. The remaining five describe how that experience is delivered internally: human-centred work, cross-disciplinary collaboration, short feedback loops, consistent services, and openness and accountability. Each principle got its own illustration.

The geometric shapes running through the images are not random props, they represent the life situations and challenges that bring people to Nav in the first place. As an overall image, a large scene illustration shows Nav as an open building: three floors, people, all kinds of roles and situations. Not an org chart. A place where lives happen. Illustrations: Gilles and Cecilie.

Research Ops
Research Ops is a central team within Nav set up to remove friction and time sinks for product teams doing user research. They handle recruitment, consent, storage, tooling, and running Nav’s own test lab and insight facility. The brief was to make an internal, infrastructure-heavy topic feel accessible and inviting. The same geometric shapes reappear – but now they’ve become objects of collection, categorisation and analysis. It’s a subtle move: an attentive viewer recognises that the shapes representing users’ life situations have here become the raw material the researcher works with. Same motif, new meaning.

The lightness of touch shows up in the details: a figure peering through binoculars with a bucket on their head, another carrying far more shapes than it’s practically possible to hold. Not funny illustrations, but memorable ones. Illustrations: Gilles and Cecilie.

The Nav Conference, 2023
The theme was poverty in the welfare state, one of the toughest subjects Nav puts on the agenda. Poverty is loaded, stigmatised, and easy to get wrong visually: too dark and it overwhelms, too light and it offends. This was precisely where the principle of lightness of touch had to prove itself, not as an aesthetic preference, but as an ethical necessity.

The idea was simple, as the best ideas are: making ends meet. A family in a tug of war, two adults pulling in opposite directions, children caught in the middle, thought bubbles showing a piggy bank and a rising graph. The metaphor is precise and universally understood – yet it carries the weight without stigmatising, and without making poverty feel abstract or distant. Illustration: Trond Vestengen, Atyp.

Across four initiatives and two years, the principles found their shape. Different illustrators, different contexts, one recognisable character. And underneath all of it, the same thing: people, drawn with warmth, in situations that matter.