An image of a hand putting together a 3-piece puzzle set with an extra bonus piece.

Illustrations for Nihongo Familiar & the Familiar Lineup

As the de facto design director at Nihongo Familiar, I have a lot of creative freedom to experiment and explore while creating product brands, illustrations, and other graphic media. Here are some highlights~

Blog Banners & Content Illustrations

Not including the meme GIFs (Pronounced with a soft G. Fight me!), I create a majority of the illustrations used in Nihongo Familiar’s blog posts. Most of these are filler & fluff images, but occasionally I get an informational one.

These are usually an exercise at meeting a good medium between trashy & treasure; quick & quality; simple & detailed— i.e. I am lazy, but want something that is at least visually appealing and makes sense why I used it while I was reading the post.

An illustration of a guy falling backwards from a vast height into a massive mountain of books. An illustration of Japanese youkai, featuring shisa; otherwise known as foo-dogs. An illustration of a blue guy doing lifts and counting reps in Japanese. A moray eel beatboxign in Japanese katakana.
An illustration of a woman talking to a pet shopkeeper about birds in Japanese. A mnemonic image comparing the KI Japanese hiragana particle to a physical key. A illustration of the blog owner celebrating in bright colors with party poppers, streamers, and a cat.

Ads & Illustrations

I use product branding for creating ad content and other relevant illustrations when they come up. Right now, the majority of that has been for social media posting, and the occasional user testing printout.

The examples here are meta images used for posting on social media for Onkaado & Kana-gories.

An image of a colourful grid system with Japanese kana in each gridlet. The Kana-gories logo is large and center in the screen. An illustration of a Fairy holding a card with Japanese onomatopoeia information on it. It is in a lush forest with other fairies.

Other assets & fluff

Occasionally I've needed to make more permanent assets for functional purposes or simple graphic fluff. These usually involve cute little images as a visual aside for important text, or something added for extra visual flair.

The examples here are a couple illustrations from the Kana-gories rule set, and an animation of a fairy carrying a card, a common motif used with Onkaado.

An illustration of a group of people writing down answers on a piece of paper. The center dude is thinking of the Japanese MO particle. An illustration of a group of people comparing answers with eachother. One is naming off an answer he got, another raises his hand in solidarity, and yet another is frustrated that his answer was not original after all.
An animation of a fairy floating and flapping its wings while is carries a card.