Grace Danico

Case Study · Illustration & Hand-Lettering

101 Best California Experiences

The L.A. Times set out to name the 101 best things to do in California. I gave the package its face — a smiling, inflatable cast of state icons and a hand-drawn logo, built to be animated and worn.

A four-panel spread of the California 101 art — a cluster of smiling flowers on orange, a grinning double cheeseburger on yellow, a palm tree with sunglasses and its tongue out on red, and 'CALIFORNIA PERSON' in puffy hand-lettering on purple
The cast — state clichés redrawn as puffy, smiling characters

01 — The Brief

A 101-item love letter to California, and no face to put on it.

The Times' travel desk spent months building California 101 — a numbered (not ranked) guide to the best experiences in the state, from escaping to Alcatraz to a lily pond in Balboa Park. It published in May 2022 across latimes.com and social.

A package that big needed an identity that could scale — a logo, section heads, a cover, art riding on every entry — and read as joyful, not another gray travel section leaning on stock landscapes.

An aerial photo of Emerald Bay and Fannette Island at Lake Tahoe, framed with a bright green border, with an illustrated smiling sun in purple sunglasses and two puffy clouds composited on top
Destination photography stayed — the characters rode along on top

“It's a peek into my travel notebook through the Golden State.”

— Christopher Reynolds, introducing California 101 · L.A. Times
The vertical California 101 key art — a Los Angeles Times masthead over bubble lettering reading '101 BEST', liquid-chrome script reading 'California', and 'EXPERIENCES', surrounded by smiling characters: a spiky sun in sunglasses, a palm tree, a jellyfish, a cactus in a pink cowboy hat, a cheeseburger, a striped soda cup, a shopping bag, clouds, flowers, a little blue car and paper lanterns
The key art — one poster, the whole cast

02 — The Cast

State clichés, redrawn as characters.

Every obvious California symbol became a soft, dimensional, smiling character: the sun in purple shades, a palm with its tongue out, a cactus in a pink cowboy hat, a cheeseburger and a striped soda cup with faces, a jellyfish, a shopping bag in sunglasses, clouds, poppies, a little blue car, a string of night-market lanterns.

Paired with hand-drawn lettering — bubble caps for 101 BEST and EXPERIENCES, a liquid-chrome script for California — and a logo where a spiky sun stands in for a character in 101. Everything was built as separate elements, so Tomasz Czajka and Li Anne Liew could animate them and the desk could drop a character onto any of the 101 entries.

03 — The System

One drawing style, three jobs: a logo, a set of section heads, and a kit of characters the whole newsroom could reuse.

Close-up of the California 101 logo — white bubble letterforms with a spiky, sunglasses-wearing sun standing in for a digit, on a warm orange ground

A sun for a number

The logo: bubble letterforms with the sunglasses-wearing sun dropped into 101. One mark, from favicon to section head.

A single illustrated palm tree with a bending gold trunk and a green frond canopy that has sunglasses and a tongue sticking out, on a red ground

Inflatable, not flat

Every character rendered soft and three-dimensional with one light source — so it held up blown large on a lead image and shrank cleanly into a thumbnail.

Three puffy smiling flowers with green leaves on an orange sky with clouds and a stream of green grass below

It kept going

A companion reader callout — what's your favorite California experience? — got its own piece: same smiling flowers, same hand.

Then the cast started moving.

Tomasz Czajka and Li Anne Liew animated the characters, and the Times shipped them as a sticker pack on its GIPHY channel — searchable inside Instagram and Facebook Stories, so a reader could stick the wobbling sun or the sunglasses tote onto their own California. They’ve since been viewed millions of times.

  • Animated sticker of the sun character — a spiky orange sun in purple sunglasses, pulsing
  • Animated sticker of the palm-tree character — sunglasses on, tongue out — swaying
  • Animated sticker of the cheeseburger and striped soda-cup characters, both with faces, bobbing
  • Animated sticker of the teal shopping-bag character in pink cat-eye sunglasses, bobbing
  • Animated sticker of the pastel jellyfish character drifting, its tentacles trailing
  • Animated sticker of the Los Angeles Times masthead with California poppies blooming up through the letters

L.A. Times “Calivibes” sticker pack · GIPHY

04 — Results

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Spot illustrations, plus a cover and hero

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Hand-lettering treatments — logo, heads, display

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Pieces in the L.A. Times Store capsule collection

California 101 became a recurring L.A. Times franchise — later returning as a printed edition and an annual update. The character world moved off the page and into the L.A. Times Store as an 18-piece capsule collection — hand-lettered crewnecks, bucket hats, totes and joggers (West Coast Weekend, Love, California, California Person…) with the little icons stitched down one sleeve. State-cliché starter pack, smiling back at you from a tote bag.

Three people posing against an orange graffiti wall in the California 101 apparel — a white 'Love, California' crewneck, a black 'West Coast Weekend' crewneck and bucket hat, and a black 'California Person' tote — all in Grace Danico's hand-lettering
The capsule at the L.A. Times Store — lettering and icons, worn

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