How to Request Illustrations

Illustrations are unique graphics that can help your brand pop up, appear more friendly, and communicate more relaxed and playful. It can guide, inform, and influence your clients and prospects, enhancing brand awareness.

But doing an illustration without a proper brief from the client is a sure recipe for aiming at a target in the dark. Below is our latest guide with tips & tricks for submitting an efficient illustration brief to your ManyPixels designer. 👇🏻

1. Project name

This first section is similar to the subject line of an email - the more concise you can be, the better! Examples: 👇🏻

• Children smiling in classroom illustration for a book cover
• Business team working in office illustration for homepage
• Dog mascot illustration for an event poster

2. Select your brand profile.

You will be asked to select which brand profile you would like to link with each brief. Are there any colors, fonts, logos, etc that we need to include in the illustrations? If you have an official brand manual, please select it here. This will help us better understand your brand's visual strategy and will dictate what style we approach when creating your graphics.

👉🏻  You can choose an already created brand profile, allowing your designer to have access to those brand assets you want to be redesigned or used as inspiration, making the process faster and easier.
👉🏻  You can request a completely new illustration, in which case you can always create a new brand profile or simply use the upload button below for any designs, assets, or inspiration we should follow. 

☝🏻 For how to create brand profiles and link them to your requests, check 👉🏻 Brand Profiles 

3. Describe the project 

Do you have any specific elements that you want to see in your illustration?
The most efficient approach for getting back high quality, unique illustrations from your designer is simply.. communication. Your assigned illustrator cannot yet read your mind so the more into detail you can go regarding what you need and how it fits into your business, the faster you will obtain a perfect matching end result. 🙌🏻
Writing “I need an illustration for an office poster” might not be enough, instead consider mentioning things like 👉🏻 “I need an illustration of 5 employees in an office doing brainstorming, for a meeting poster, using the attached brand assets."  
If you avoid being specific here, your illustrator will subjectively interpret the brief, which might not match your expectations for the end result. 

4. Usage, sizes, and formats 

👉🏻 How many illustrations do you need?
As obvious as it may seem, this information is essential. Whether it’s one illustration for a poster or 12 vectors to illustrate a digital story, your Manypixels assigned illustrator needs to know! 🙌🏻

👉🏻 Where will you use the illustration/s? 

Do you need graphics for print (books, brochures, presentations, posters, etc.) or for web (homepage, landing page, blog, social media, etc.)? Maybe you're looking for illustrations that can work across multiple formats. Always mention these details to your designer, this helps give us an idea of the scale of the task and how best to approach it.

👉🏻 What size and format do you need? 

What size do you need the illustrations to be and what file formats do you need us to provide? This information is essential to know from the beginning of the project so that no time is wasted on incorrect formats.  Large, complex print illustrations, for example, take longer than some low-resolution graphics for the web. We need to consider this in the scope of work so as to properly set up delivery expectations. 

5. Inspiration 

What other similar illustration concepts do you like and why? You can upload them as attachments, share them as links or even save them and select them as your brand profile.
You can also upload a pre-existing illustration you might have that you want to redesign.
☝🏻Where to find inspiration? Check our Ultimate Guide to creating efficient Mood Boards.

🙌🏻 After you've successfully completed all sections of the brief and submitted the project, your assigned designer will start working on it and will deliver the first draft on the next business day (sometimes 2 for complex requests). If revisions are needed, no worries, you can easily communicate with your designer using the chat in the ManyPixels app.

Ready to submit your first illustration request? Pick the Advanced plan here.

Didn't find what you were looking for? 👀 Check out our Scope of Service or contact us directly.