MSD persona library

The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) presented a lot of service design proposals and findings to various ministers. In order to humanize what was often a large sheet of text and statistics. It was not possible to use photos of the people who were interviewed or with who co-design workshops were run - it was considered potentially sensitive for discrimination purposes.

So that these people could be represented in some way, I created a series of personas to use as placeholders for client photos. I chose a color palette that would be considered relatively neutral and created a library of vector illustrations in Adobe Illustrator that could represent different people in different stages and walks of life.

It turned into something of a living document, where people would request new faces until there was a good selection of 20 or so unique personalities.