Deep Dive Course:
Telling Stories Through Visuals with Sara Londoño

A 6-week deep dive into illustration as a visual language—turning ideas, metaphors, and abstraction into a cohesive visual essay.

Join the course

This course explores illustration as a tool for building visual languages through observation, abstraction, and intentional design decisions. Rather than focusing on realistic drawing, participants will learn how to identify essential forms, reduce complexity, and develop consistency across multiple illustrations, using these formal strategies to express abstract ideas, emotions, and narratives through visual form. Through this process, they will develop a cohesive body of work grounded in a personal idea and supported by a clear visual system.

By the end of the course, each participant will have created a visual essay: a series of interconnected illustrations based on a topic of their choice. They will develop and expand a single concept or narrative, translating it into a cohesive set of images that communicate through a consistent visual language.

Alongside the final project, participants will leave with a practical framework for developing illustration systems through abstraction and making intentional decisions around form, structure, composition, and color. These methods can be applied to editorial illustration, books, poster series, branding, campaigns, iconography, visual identity systems, and other projects that require a cohesive visual language.

Across six sessions, participants will research, conceptualize, illustrate, refine, and present this visual essay, using illustration not only as a means of representation, but as a method for thinking, communicating, and constructing meaning through form.

Who will be your teacher?

Sara Londoño is a shape designer working with form and structure to create visuals that make complex ideas simple and direct. Her practice explores form as a way of thinking, not just appearance. She cares deeply about substance, focusing on what is essential in her graphics in order to make space for meaning.

With a background in industrial and interaction design, she is interested in functionality, systems, and how people engage with objects and environments. This perspective informs her approach to illustration and graphic design, where meaning is not fixed but suggested, allowing space for interpretation and reflection, and opening a dialogue between the work and the viewer.

She is interested in how structure and simplicity can coexist with expression, and how restraint in form can still allow for emotional and conceptual depth within visual work.

Is this a course for you?

For whom is the course:

This workshop is open to students, professionals, and curious creative minds interested in illustration, graphic design, and creative processes. No advanced drawing skills are required. Basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is recommended. The workshop is suitable for beginners as well as experienced designers looking to explore abstraction and illustration through structured visual approaches.

What is required:

Pen and paper, Adobe Illustrator

What will you learn:

Participants will leave with a practical framework for creating illustration systems through abstraction, making intentional decisions around form, structure, composition, and color. They will move from idea to visual exploration, develop visual metaphors, and refine their work into a consistent illustration language across multiple pieces. These methods allow them to create cohesive visual languages applicable to diverse projects such as branding, editorial illustration, iconography, and multi-platform campaigns.