For the past few years, Erasmus+ makes a digital Christmas calendar for their Instagram. This project is often delegated to the intern so I was excited to take on the challenge! The brief required the calendar to have fun facts with an international and festive theme and it was to be formatted for Instagram Stories and then later saved as a Highlight. Wanting to make this project special with my skill set, I proposed I could illustrate the calendar.
I started with a big brainstorming session and eventually landed on the idea of showcasing Christmas foods from around the world. It was well-received and felt like a fun and interactive idea. This theme was a fairly simple concept and allowed for strong visual storytelling and cultural variety. I created 24 unique food illustrations and wrapping paper backgrounds using Procreate, opting for a soft, painterly style. I chose this style for its charming appearance and time efficiency. For layout and text design, I used Canva Pro, the tool preferred by the Finnish National Agency for Education (Opetushallitus), which also made collaboration and possible edits easier for the team. To enhance content engagement, I incorporated recipe links for all the foods in the posts. This encouraged users to engage with the content beyond passive viewing—aligning the visual design with social media strategy.
From plain illustrations to adding the texts, logos and country identifying flags.
This was a time-intensive project that combined content creation, visual storytelling, and project management. It challenged me to keep a consistent illustration style across a large volume of assets. It felt really magical to be able to illustrate a christmas calendar and it was nice to learn about so many food traditions around the world so the process was very rewarding.
Mockups of the Instagram Highlights