How to create illustrations

that client will love?

Today our brilliant illustrator Nikita will share his best practices on how to create illustrations for clients that meet their needs.

First of all, Nikita highlights how crucial it is to give the client ideas on how to use the illustrations in day-to-day business work, so that can bring the most value. Unfortunately, in many cases, clients end up with a bunch of images they use once for the packaging, for example, and they don’t know else to do with them.

But the opportunities are limitless!

Illustrations attract attention, they are an easy instrument to explain something very clearly in a simple and creative way. Vector illustrations, for example, can be turned into animations. Illustrations often become part of the branding and appear in all spheres of business (website, uniform, business cards, etc), creating a unified and professional experience for the clients throughout their customer journey.

At the same time, it’s very important to ask the client about all the ways they plan to use the illustration. Since there are so many ways to use the illustrations, we need to ask the client about their intentions. If we don’t know the whole picture, we might miss something important before drawing the presentation.

Here is the process on how to make illustrations the client will love:

The first step is understanding the client’s needs.

If the client knows exactly what they want - ask for references, examples, and how they will use the illustrations. In many cases clients come to Etcetera without a clear understanding of the final result. They just have a general idea, and then it’s the illustrator’s job to provide turn it into reality.

Illustrators do extensive research of what other companies are doing in this market, collect ideas from various sources and present them to the client with the first sketches to finalize the concept. In this step, the illustrator mostly thinks about associations and does a lot of search (for example, in tools like Iconfinder, Shutterstock).

Then the actual illustrating starts.

Based on the general theme agreed with the client, and the use scenario of the particular icon, the illustrator begins their work. In some cases, you need to create illustrations for difficult concepts that are very hard to depict in one image. In this cases, Nikita suggests to brake the concept into smaller simpler parts and do the illustration in steps.

To sum up, illustrations have two main goals - branding and explanatory. They have to be easy to understand, but at the same time unique for each business. Don’t try to draw immediately after getting the task, do enough research and understand the client’s business need for the illustration. After you know what you are drawing and why - then you apply all the creativity and imagination to add an original, wow-touch to the result.