Tips on designing custom illustration as a brand identity leverage

Apr 7
02:00

2022

Maria Kharlantseva

Maria Kharlantseva

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For each brand, it’s critical to stay authentic to deliver an exceptional experience to its customers. There are quite a few reasons for that. First of all, the public is more likely to deal with established brands that have something unique and outstanding to offer to their clientele. And if your company doesn’t have that opportunity, the brand unintentionally loses its value, so customers tend to avoid it and search for more authentic offers.

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Also,Tips on designing custom illustration as a brand identity leverage Articles when having a distinct brand identity, the company can easily stand out from the competition and advance its products and services to the storefront of the market. Ultimately, excellent brand identity is what urges people to trust you and be proud of being a part of that outstanding community. 

However, it might be hard to craft a brand identity for a business and engage with the audience. It takes a dedicated approach and lots of things to do – from logo design to custom web design and custom illustration design. There are staggering costs for competent web design and finances to promote it.

Given these difficulties, some companies search for easier and cheaper ways of highlighting their services. They address mediocre web building services, hoping to invest heavily in marketing comprising usability and practicality. They escape audience research and produce products that are not compatible with the needs of their target customers, thus ineffective and useless. They use stock illustrations or images that deteriorate their performances because they ruin trust and credibility. People learn that visual language, and when seeing the same stock illustrations associated with another brand, the brand identity will weaken. With custom illustrations, the chances to succeed double significantly.

Essentially, custom illustration is a visual representation of whatever information, aimed to engage with the viewers or transmit a message. Web illustrations can be infographics, charts, or abstract artwork. When using custom illustrations in your brand identity, you can achieve consistency, covering each of your products. For instance, you can use the same style illustrations for your blog articles and UX points, which contributes to the holistic image of your website. Also, you can employ it in the marketing materials and use them as design elements in your letterheads or brochures. Such practice is helpful especially for large-scale companies that have several channels of communication and want to maintain a holistic image across all of them.

When it comes to creating custom illustrations you have several options. You can address experienced custom illustrations New York agencies to craft an excellent visual language for your company. Specialists will look through your company, brand mission and values, your website, and other digital assets in order to create a vision to design upon. In other words, custom illustrations should be meaningful and transmit the same message to the audience as your brand does.

If you want to try custom illustration design by yourself, you need to know some essentials that will help you to enhance your brand identity. These are valuable tips on the custom illustrations design process:

#Choose proper colors

Color plays a significant role in the perception not only of the illustration but the overall vision of whatever product. Thus, when designing a custom illustration, make sure you use proper colors and textures depending on what message and feeling you want to transmit. Bright colors are perfect for entertaining content, while pastel colors will suit the business theme better.

#Organize illustration’s element 

Composition is another vital aspect of an excellent illustration. Thus, it’s essential to decide on the way the elements inside should be placed. If you have a primary element, and you want it to attract greater attention – place it at the storefront or use a bigger size for its saturation. Put other supplementary elements in the background. In other words, put the components according to their importance for the illustration’s holistic perception. Such a composition will facilitate the cognitive load, so users will see what you intended to transmit instead of a strange mix of things.

#Add details

It’s critical to remember that your custom illustration shouldn’t be flat in terms of both form and meaning. For that reason, you need to add some details or other accents, which will make it look and feel more prolific and sophisticated. That practice adds to the general style and mood of the illustration and enhances the articulated message. However, keep a close eye on the number of accents. If overdo and add excessive details, you're risking creating a visual clutter with no meaning the viewers will prefer to avoid. It’s vital to keep everything in balance.

#Look for inspiration 

Before you start making the illustration, it might be helpful to collect references and images for inspiration. These may be images or photos, beautiful color combinations, or artworks by other artists. When collecting references, you work out your creative muscle, which leads to qualified and creative results. Also, if you can’t decide on something, reference can urge you to the right solution. What’s important is that you have to get inspired instead of copying the existing works.

All in all, custom illustration is a powerful leverage to your brand identity. It can engage, impress the viewers and transmit the desired messages effectively. Also, for a contemporary design, which becomes more and more visual, custom illustrations are not simply the artworks but the means of communication and expressiveness. However, when designing one, you need to use proper and tested techniques to achieve success.