When you’re working hard to improve your brand’s online presence, using every tool out there is more than just a smart idea, it is essential. You want to snag your customers’ attention, and so does everyone else. So, how do you keep up and stand out?
In 2019, a design trend that focused on custom illustrations was booming, and everywhere you look, you can still see them.
Behance voted it design trend of the year, and since then, marketers haven’t looked back, and illustrations are a significant part of the scene. When you want to create attention-grabbing, professional web and advertising designs, custom portrait illustrations can give your brand the boost it needs to steal the show.
What Is A Portrait Illustration?
A portrait illustration is a visual representation of a person. It can be done in various mediums and isn’t necessarily supposed to be as lifelike as a photograph. The idea is that it can be recognized as the person on whom it’s based.
Most artists draw portraits from real life, and portrait illustration is one of the oldest types of art. Today, portraits in varying styles are also used in brand marketing and promotion.
When To Use Custom Portrait Illustrations?
Stock photos just don’t cut it sometimes. Here are some of the top reasons to use custom portrait illustrations.
To Depict An Abstract Concept
A picture can’t always depict what you need it to when it comes to a specific concept or event. In these cases, custom portrait illustrations are the perfect choice. Think about showing your brand’s founder alongside their ideas for the company. Custom portrait illustrations can depict the personality of your founder and your brand strategy.
To Show A Subject That’s Too Grandiose For A Photo
Taking a picture of something massive, like a mountain range or space, can be difficult. It can be even more difficult to show those things alongside a representation of your brand, like a mascot or character. Illustrations have no limits. They can depict things that don’t exist, huge subjects, and the exact situation you want them in. For a happy customer riding a whale while drinking your beverage, the illustration has you covered.
To Match A Specific Style
Portrait illustrations can also reflect a certain style across your branding, providing brand coherence. They can be unique to your brand, consistent across all platforms, and stand less of a chance of being similar to a competitor. You’ll have a unified look that’s recognizable no matter the campaign or platform. A custom portrait illustration captures the feel, mood, and atmosphere you need in a way that you won’t get from photos.
To Tell A Story
Portrait illustrations can help you when you want compelling images that tell a story to increase your brand’s emotional impact. Illustrated scenes and characters can guide your audience along a preset journey better than just photos and in appealing and personalized ways.
To Visualize Data
Showing data with an infographic is an excellent way to help your audience visualize the information. According to HubSpot, infographics are one of the most used forms of content for marketing, and if you’ve looked around, you’ve probably noticed too.
Custom portrait illustrations can help yours to stand out by providing a relatable character, showing a world figure’s achievements, or humanizing your executives.
To Showcase Your Company’s Light Culture
In some cases, brands use illustrations to showcase how they are different from other more rigid businesses within their industry. They can make your brand feel more relatable, accessible, and friendly. And because the style used can vary so much, you can control how cartoonish or childlike you want the illustrations to be while still offering an approachable design.
Custom Portrait Illustrations For Web And Advertising
The internet is fiercely competitive, and getting your potential customers’ attention is a significant task for any business. Custom portrait illustrations can kick your advertising and promotion up a notch. Some great ways to use them include the following.
Character Logo
Using people or characters on logos is a great way to influence your target market and connect with them. Many well-loved food brands use character logos, and you’ll also see them on several service providers that lack a concrete product. By using a custom portrait in your logo, you can ensure that it’s unique to your brand and literally give a face to your business.
It can also increase feelings of warmth and connection associated with your brand. Character logos can convey a welcoming message that’s easy to see and interpret at just a glance.
Introduce Your Team
Think about showing off your team or customer service reps. By showcasing them in an approachable way, you can emphasize human interaction and connection. These portrait illustrations highlight a lighthearted, fun, and human-centric approach to customer service and care, showing customers they’ll be connecting with real people while still offering a unified style and presentation, which can sometimes be lost when you’re just using photos.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a great way to connect with a specific group of people who you already know are in your target audience. But, while emails can still be very powerful tools, many of them are deleted upon arrival.
Adding custom portrait illustrations to your email newsletter can provide a solution and help your emails to stand out from other perceived “junk mail.”
In fact, with a captivating illustration, perhaps even an animated one, you can turn an otherwise “boring” email into something people can’t help but read. You can even include custom portrait illustrations of the team or writer of the email.
Personal/Organizational Campaigns
Think of election campaigns and the illustrated portraits they use of candidates. These depictions can be so much more interesting, eye-catching, and dramatic. It can humanize the person and conveys their important message without writing a word.
Marketing Your Blog
Marketers can use portrait illustrations throughout their platforms and can even create a recognizable face that accompanies readers throughout a blog. When the image is paired with each blog and everywhere it’s advertised, it creates a visual that readers expect to see and welcomes them to all your blogs and marketing.
Featured & Hero Images
Featured images, or Post Thumbnails, accompany blog articles as visual support. They represent the mood of the content and grab attention.
Similarly, hero header images, the large banner at the top of a website, can showcase the purpose of your website and encourage visitors to look around.
A custom portrait illustration in these spots can provide a simple yet powerful image that conveys a complex idea quickly.
About Us Pages
A crucial part of your website is the About Us page. Visitors look at this page to see what your brand is all about and who the people are behind it. Portrait illustrations can capture your brand personality and showcase your team in a cohesive, attractive way.
Product Endorsements
When you get influencers or celebrities to endorse your products, you can kick it up a notch by creating a portrait illustration of that person with your product. They can also be a unique way to show fans of that celebrity how your brand works with them. And customized portraits can even be used as merch items.
Tips For Custom Portrait Illustrations
Custom portrait illustrations for your brand or business should fulfill a few standards. They’ll be representing your brand after all. Here are a couple of things your designs should do.
Use Your Existing Branding Guidelines
Your portrait should reflect your company’s core mission statement and values and using your branding guidelines to achieve that is crucial. The design’s colors, shapes, and overall tone need to match your established brand identity to ensure continuity. It will also ensure your audience recognizes your new images quickly and associates them with the brand promise you’ve already laid out, particularly if this will be your first time utilizing portrait illustrations.
Make It Fun Yet Professional
Fun, laid-back vibes are naturally associated with a large number of portrait styles. However, if you will be using the image for branding, professionalism will be essential. You don’t want to lean on outdated caricatures or stereotypes, and you need to be sure your designs won’t offend anyone. The motto is humor within professional boundaries.
Will Custom Portrait Illustrations Work With Older Markets?
Using custom portrait illustrations doesn’t just appeal to younger audiences. They can appeal to everyone. Of course, you may need to adjust the style to increase how age-appropriate your design is. Think about the colors, gestures, and facial expressions when you’re coming up with ideas for your portraits.
How To Get Custom Portrait Illustrations For Your Brand
Not everyone has a professional graphic designer or illustrator on their staff to draw up custom portrait illustrations. What’s more, not every designer or artist has the skill to create the best portraits for your brand that capture your message, personality, and voice while serving the ultimate goals of your business.
For individual creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses just starting out, bringing on an artist as an employee can be too costly and time-consuming. When you’re looking at freelance marketplaces, finding the right person for the job can be just as, if not more, time-consuming, and it can be difficult to vet their quality. Worse, the timeframes for completion vary significantly. What’s more, can you ensure that the person you’re working with will provide all the necessary files and formats you need to use your illustrations both online and offline however you want? What if you aren’t familiar with the file formats yourself?
You don’t want to settle for something you don’t love or something that only does half the job because you can’t illustrate yourself or find a good freelancer. Stock photos can only take you so far and aren’t wholly original.
When you want talented illustrators for an affordable cost, a much better choice is to work with a flat-rate subscription service that can cover all your creative needs. When you work with Flocksy, you’ll get services for your branding, including custom logos, characters, social media ads, videos, and even copywriting, in an all-in-one creative service platform.
Our monthly subscriptions provide the professional work you need for an upfront fee so that you can focus on the other important tasks that need to get done. Flocksy’s no-contract, all-in-one format also puts all your creatives under one roof. Your graphic designer, illustrator, video editor, and freelance copywriter, they’re all at Flocksy.
Getting Your Custom Portrait Illustrations At Flocksy
With Flocksy illustration services, beginning a “portrait illustrations” project is easy. You’ll use the intuitive dashboard to request your designs and see results in as little as 24 to 48 hours.
So, how do you start?
First, click on the “Create new project” button from the main dashboard. Then choose “custom illustration project.” Now, find the option for portrait illustrations, which will provide you with portrait designs for your brand based on your unique needs.
When you’re starting your custom illustration project, include as many details about what you are looking for as possible, including illustration styles you like, inspirations, your brand personality and style guide, and the feelings you want to evoke with the illustration.
Your illustrator will create something truly unique based on your brand’s purpose, style, and personality. Plus, you can work with the same great artist over and over again whenever you need brand illustrations, which will ensure all your designs are consistent and save you time because the artist will get to know you so well.
Soon, you’ll have a professional portrait illustration ready for your marketing and promotion. You can trust the skills of Flocksy professionals to produce the highest quality and most effective custom brand illustrations. So, start your portrait illustration project today.