Zosia Bonkowska illustration

21/05/2026

At the end of last year I was approached by , a mindfulness and wellbeing education platform for children, to refresh their branding and create new templates for their Kind Minds curriculum programmes.

✏️ I created PPT templates and programme layouts, refreshed the colours and proposed a child-friendly font pairing, and most importantly - illustrated a whole bunch of cute characters! Three illustrated sets were designed to support different age groups and emotional themes.

Here are some excerpts from the branding guidelines documents. ✨

12/05/2026

At the end of last year, I was approached by the to create new characters for their educational materials and overall brand language ✏️

The brief was to design three groups of characters representing feelings and mindful states:

abstract forms representing emotions for the youngest children, animals for slightly older ones, and people for the oldest group.

Here I’m sharing a step-by-step look at how the “Concentrate” character from the final set came to life ✨

05/05/2026

I’ll be at this week and I’m bringing some fresh stickers to give away & exchange! ✨

Are you going too? Let’s connect 😀🍒

02/05/2026

21/04/2026

This is a sticker I never submitted to Open Call.

Why? Because I didn’t like it. Because I convinced myself it didn’t really represent my style. Because I overthought it, redrew it five times… and then gave up. And because by the time I wanted to create a new design and submit it, I missed the deadline 😒

Looking at it now, it’s actually fine. It just didn’t stand a chance against my own head at the time…

I guess this is your reminder (and mine) that not every piece needs to be perfect to be worth putting out there. And that’s why I’m sharing it now ✨

16/04/2026

My process, from start to finish for my recent commission ✨

09/04/2026

It feels like the right time to revisit some personal editorial pieces I made during Bootcamp back in 2024 ✏️ 

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how important little self-set exercises like this are for developing style, composition, and confidence in your process. The more often you practice generating ideas, testing layouts, and solving visual problems, the more naturally it starts to come.

That thought came back to me during my recent commission for G2, which had a turnaround of just 3 days 👀 When you need to create quickly under pressure, having a clear creative process really helps.

Mine usually looks like this:
✏️ brainstorming (mind maps + research)
✏️ initial messy sketches
✏️ refined sketches to share with AD
✏️ refined composition with any changes
✏️ colour drafts (with rough colour application)
✏️ final piece in the selected colour
✏️ any final refinements
✏️ print ready files

A little note for context: the pieces shared here were developed as personal work during the bootcamp and received feedback from .datele from and from . They weren’t commissioned projects, but creative exercises built around editorial prompts.

07/04/2026

I illustrated an article about ‘trimester zero’ for !

It was really interesting to explore different angles to portray the overwhelm and complex emotions that can often come with trying for a baby. I absolutely loved working on this illustration and diving deeper into the topic. It was also so exciting to see it live on the Guardian page and in the paper yesterday!

Thank you to for a great AD 💙