Simple is Hard. Birthday Doodle.

Google has it's own doodles for different events and other companies is trying to copy that. It's trendy. So Russian local Google Mail.ru also changing it's logotype covers for different events like that. Once they've ordered me to draw such a change for users birthday purpose. It looks so simple now but actually there were a lot of unseen work behind.

I've started from pencil sketches as usual and then made some additions in the layout because this order was specific. I had to stay strict in dimentions.

After approval I've created the clouds pattern so the header image could fit into any screen size and started to color the whole scene.

There was few small changes like sky and copter colors and age of the person. We had such a song in Russian that a wizard will come in the blue helicopter and will gift you 500 eskimo. (ice creams on the stick covered with fat fur coat ofcourse).

Here is the screenshot preview of the page showing the postcard when user have a birthday.

As you can see it looks really simple but actually it was done in about a working week with all that small changed and tweaks fitting those small elements and checking how it works in different resolutions.

P.S. Wanted to test Steepshot posting. But found the quality loss during uploading there unfortunately. They are using jpgs with low quality filters. Had to change the post preview image for the png here.