How To Use An Illustration Service
Businesses may question how an illustration service could be used in marketing literature or marketing campaigns and struggle to visualise the benefits of using an illustration over and above stock photography for instance.
One reason alone could be to set yourself apart from the crowd of other businesses using stock photography – which has become very popular of recent years compared to for instance in the 1950′s when illustrations were extremely popular by comparison.
Most businesses using an illustration service do so because they need custom designed illustrations that they can use in marketing campaigns, marketing literature, and often to compliment and reinforce their brand image.
An illustration service can be beneficial over and above stock photography for any of the following reasons:
1. Illustrated mascot design – either as part of a logo design, or to simply compliment a company brand identity and provide a ‘face’ of a company to reinforce the brand messages.
2. To be used in marketing campaigns in place of photography to display a lifestyle scene or to very precisely convey a concept related to the brand – concepts cannot always be accurately conveyed when using ‘stock art’ or ‘stock photography’ which force one to seek out a design that almost matches your concept … but ‘almost matches’ may not be as effective in your marketing campaigns as a fully matched concept.
3. Commissioning an illustration service for diagrams and technical drawings; providing a more user friendly environment, and reducing customer confusion. This is when an illustration service is used to convey complex ideas or detailed processes and use illustrative design to simplify them.
Not every design agency can offer an in house illustration service and those that do (including freelance illustrators) are usually unable to do so at competitive pricing without holding onto copyright.
This isn’t always the case (we are very reasonable for instance and always hand over copyright) and you should be cautioned that not acquiring copyright as part of the illustration service provided hinders your future use of the art work, and does not secure your exclusive use of the illustrations (ie your competitor may use them one day also)
When commissioning an illustration service the aim should always be to integrate your copyright owned illustrations into a your marketing campaigns and make them earn their keep (return on investment).
Those marketing campaigns can be on the web or in print as long as the illustration service you have commissioned creates designs that are adaptable for both mediums.
Really for a business the best type of illustration is a vector illustration because this provides the business owner with a commercial illustration which is completely flexible. Any aspect of a vector illustration can be easily changed after completion at any point in the future and vector illustrations are fully scalable to any dimension (business card or billboard for instance) without loss of quality of the image.
You could use a custom designed illustration in stationery, your website, flyers, brochures, postcards, exhibition display and much much more.
2 Responses to “How To Use An Illustration Service”
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I agree with you, when looking at designs (especially in print) there is a lack of illustrations – and it really makes a difference to see a clean illustration once in a while. I have also noticed that vector illustrations on the web are often cheaper than stock photography, I believe this is due to the lack of demand. Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to improve my illustrator skills so I can get creating some nice vector designs, I think in the future they could become quite popular.
Oh, and great illustration on the Lotus design, it’s a favourite of mine.
With regards to vector stock on the web, I think the main reason why it’s cheap is because if you look through a stock agency such as http://www.istockphoto.com for instance you can start to see that everyone is offering illustrations in pretty much the same style.
It’s all swirly patterns/flowers, silhouettes where essentially the characters have been traced from photos, and detailed illustrations that often look the same as all the others in style or are lacking in true detail… ie they are lazy illustrations whipped out quickly for a bit of stock download income.
You do get the odd bit of interesting work in stock libraries, but it’s not really the place to find a good illustration because most of it is pretty unoriginal in style.
So I don’t feel the low cost is due to lack of demand, I think it’s due to the low quality of most of the illustrations in the stock libraries.
Illustrations are pretty high value work compared to other design services, provided that the illustrations offered are of high and ‘original’ quality and don’t look the same as everyone else’s work.
I personally have a fairly high demand for illustration services considering I don’t actually particularly market that service ‘hard’ … it’s sort of marketed along with the general graphic design service and I could probably get a lot more illustration work if I were to target that more.
I think any illustrator prepared to put the effort in to create originally styled work pieces can expect to earn a good living being an illustrator. Illustrations are popular ‘enough’ for the amount of working illustrators out there competing for the work … ie there is enough illustrative work available to skilled illustrators because there simply aren’t that many professional illustrators working.
If you have a look round at illustrators individual website portfolios and compare that to what you see in a stock library you can see there is a vast difference in quality. The best illustrators don’t use istockphoto.com for income because they don’t need to – they can get paying clients to pay them much much more for each workpiece than they can earn via istockphoto.com per workpiece.
The Lotus illustration? Interesting to hear that it’s a favourite of yours, I mean I like it, but it’s not my favourite by miles…… essentially I like her face a lot still, but years after it’s completion I’ve decided that the body is entirely wrong.