Design studio BUCK has partnered with LinkedIn to revolutionize how the platform's billion-plus users celebrate career milestones. The collaboration resulted in 16 new animated illustrations that users can choose from when marking important moments like new jobs, certifications, and work anniversaries, replacing the platform's previous generic graphics with more personalized and culturally resonant visuals.
According to Sarah Alpern, LinkedIn's vice president of architecture and head of design, these new visuals function "like meticulously chosen artwork that bring the house of LinkedIn to life, making milestone moments feel more personal, more vibrant, and more you." The project addressed a complex challenge: creating meaningful illustrations for a global audience without relying on tired visual clichés or culturally specific references that might alienate users.
Twisha Patni, BUCK's art director who led the project, explained that LinkedIn approached the studio with a dual mission. "The ask was twofold: to develop a refreshed illustration and motion system that felt expressive, elevated and globally resonant, while also reflecting LinkedIn's evolving brand direction," she said. The project moved at an ambitious pace, requiring just 10 weeks from initial strategy to final delivery, with BUCK handling design and animation while collaborating closely with LinkedIn's brand and product teams.
Rather than creating a single visual style, BUCK's strategy team first helped define LinkedIn's brand role as "an active guide" that helps members navigate career changes and discover opportunities. From this foundation, they established design principles and creative constants that would ensure cohesion across different illustration styles while maintaining clear attribution to LinkedIn's master brand. The team conducted extensive research into what celebration means across different cultures, roles, and milestones to avoid overused visual tropes.
User experience research revealed a crucial insight that shaped the project's direction. "Emotional resonance matters as much as visual design, and color amplifies this impact," Patni noted. This understanding led to the development of what Audrey Davis, LinkedIn's director of product design and creative systems, described as "a big glow-up" for the platform's visual language.
The visual transformation involved expanding LinkedIn's existing celebration system, which was rooted in geometric shapes like circles, squares, and clean forms. BUCK fused these structural elements with organic components, natural textures, and human gestures to introduce warmth without abandoning the platform's professional foundation. "This blend of geometric and organic allowed us to communicate structure and growth simultaneously," Patni explained. "It also mirrored the balance LinkedIn is trying to strike in its brand: professional but human, global but personal, sincere but expressive."
Developing visual metaphors that would resonate across cultures required methodical thinking and careful vetting. The team began by identifying universal themes like inspiration, collaboration, achievement, and innovation, then translated these into fresh, accessible metaphors that felt familiar at first glance. Every concept underwent review through a lens of cultural neutrality, with LinkedIn providing research and insights to ensure nothing felt alienating or overly specific to particular regions or demographics.
The studio ultimately developed four distinct illustration styles tied to the system's core principles, ranging from textured, hand-crafted moments to bold geometric compositions and subtle gradient effects. This versatility enabled the team to speak to LinkedIn's global, multicultural audience without leaning too heavily into any single metaphor or mood. The variety also acknowledged that celebration in professional contexts has many different tonal ranges – what feels joyful to one user might feel quiet or reflective to another.
Making the illustrations user-selectable wasn't merely about providing variety; it represented a fundamental design decision based on understanding how people experience milestones differently. By identifying themes that work across emotional spectrums from calm to optimistic to energetic, BUCK created visuals that allow users to choose how they want to mark their achievements. This approach demonstrates LinkedIn's care for user individuality while maintaining brand consistency.
LinkedIn's signature blue color presented both constraints and opportunities for the design team. BUCK's elegant solution treated the brand color as "a thread rather than a boundary." Every illustration includes a focal or supporting moment where the brand blue quietly anchors the composition, while an expanded palette of neutrals and accent tones supports emotional tone and metaphor. This approach created room for both vibrant and minimal compositions depending on the moment, without sacrificing brand recognition.
Motion design added the final layer of sophistication to the project. The animations use seamless loops, static cameras, and small storytelling gestures to feel reflective and purposeful without overwhelming users' feeds. Even the quietest animations incorporate rhythm and personality through details like spinning flowers, people bending large plants in unison, or confetti popping from keyboards. These gestures add dimension and help users feel that their milestones are not just noticed, but valued.
The animation team also solved significant technical challenges, developing smart techniques to refine and optimize lightweight JSON file sizes while ensuring each frame felt dimensional and dynamic. This technical achievement was crucial for maintaining performance across LinkedIn's massive user base while delivering high-quality visual experiences.
With over one billion users worldwide, inclusive character representation required exceptionally careful consideration. In some illustrations, people are represented through universal gestures such as hands passing objects or feet in motion, allowing for relatability without specificity. Where full characters appear, the team focused on variety in form, skin tone, and styling while avoiding overly literal or prescriptive identities. Editorial cropping and thoughtful composition helped balance clarity with inclusivity, creating a natural rather than formulaic feel.
The project demonstrates how thoughtful illustration systems can bring humanity and cultural resonance to global digital platforms, transforming generic digital moments into genuinely personal experiences. For creative professionals working at scale, it serves as a reminder that constraint and flexibility aren't opposites – sometimes the most expressive systems are built on the clearest foundations, enabling both brand consistency and individual expression across diverse global audiences.
