Alegria (Spanish for "joy") was a long-term illustration system developed for Facebook across a three-year retainer. At its peak, a dedicated team of anywhere around ten artists worked daily to produce illustrations and animations that populated Facebook's entire ecosystem. We were, in the most literal sense, an image factory.

The system was built around surrealistic color, heavily abstracted human forms reduced to geometric simplicity, and a modular approach to shape-building that made it easy for any illustrator to work within. That scalability was a feature, not a byproduct, as Alegria was designed from the start to replicate and expand.

And it did, perhaps beyond anyone's expectations: the style spawned innumerable imitators, saturated the broader design landscape, and defined a visual moment that's still being reckoned with.

I joined the project as an illustrator and finished it as an art director.