The project
Google commissioned Buck Amsterdam to develop the visual language for Google Contacts VIP, a Google Pixel feature designed to help users stay close to the people who matter most. I was brought in to illustrate a set of UI components across the feature — significant date cards, empty states, and other interface moments.
The brief was deliberately minimal: a color palette, a set of geometric shapes, and a single direction for the style — “Focus on style inspired by Timo Kuilder. Use the artist as a ref, but that we will def not replicate, just use it so it lives in the same world.”
How I worked
I worked directly in vector, in the project’s colors, from day one. Almost no sketches — working at full fidelity in context gives a clearer read of what holds up at scale. I placed each illustration inside the actual interface early on to test legibility and line weight at the right size.
The style direction was established quickly, which opened up room for a different kind of work: generating a variety of proposals for each screen and selecting the strongest.
On this project, I worked within Timo Kuilder’s visual territory and brought my own style to it.
The characters are diverse in age, gender, and skin tone — but the ambition goes beyond representation. It’s about attitude: figures with presence and energy, warmth in how they’re built, a sense of community in how they occupy the space.
The illustrations
The illustrations are designed to live inside Google Pixel’s interface at specific moments of a user’s experience — when a birthday surfaces, an anniversary, a significant date, or when the feature is empty and waiting.
They needed to feel at home in a UI while reading clearly at small sizes. The guiding principle was simplicity: forms and palettes that hold up across contexts, across device settings, across the full range of moments the feature covers.
Credits
Client: Google
Illustrations: Clemence Thune
Agency: Buck Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Vincent Lammers
Executive Producer: Chance Woodward
Associate Creative Director: Ellen Turnill Montoya
Head of Design: Simon Buijs
Animation Director: Daniel Rodrigues
Producer: Bénédicte Gold-Dalg
