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 1950s 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.

Ways in which illustrations can be used in your business marketing;

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.