Bespoke illustration has the power to tell your unique story.
Whether that's conveying complex platforms and services, long buying journeys or technical products...
Trusted by Leading B2B Organisations
WHY BESPOKE
Expand your brand's storytelling with custom illlustration
Often AI generated images or stock libraries just don’t have the granularity or true understanding to really show how your platform, service or buying journey works to a potential prospect – our expert illustrators do, and can often convey that before anyone has read a word of copy.
Bespoke illustration can also make your brand instantly recognisable. The same visual language across a whitepaper, an ad, your website and a sales deck compounds into memory, and memory is what shortens the next conversation.
And it needn’t be a big-budget exercise. Once a style is established for your brand, the rest is a straightforward, less time-consuming process.
Examples illustrated for our clients
Six briefs. Six different visual languages.
Each creative illustrated to fit seamlessly into the client’s brand, with their message always front and centre. All this can be conveyed through many different styles – isometric worlds, line-art, contemporary illustration, flat vector characters, technical diagrams.
User journeys / roadmaps
Brief
Create a website hero illustration showing a medical device compliance journey.
Technical diagrams
Brief
Show the secure end-to-end capture and tracking of maritime route data.
Icon sets
Brief
Create a selection of icons for a payment orchestration platform.
Ad Campaigns
Brief
A dynamic ad campaign showing a data rich platform without being information heavy.
Contemporary web assets
Brief
A set of website illustrations to highlight collaboration within teams.
Large format illustration
Brief
Large scale wall decals for an innovation centre showcasing the variety of sectors.
Where it earns its keep
Illustration for every touchpoint.
01
Blog & article headers
A recognisable header on every post, so your content looks like a body of work rather than a feed.
02
Whitepapers & reports
Covers, diagrams and data illustrations that make a gated asset worth the form fill.
03
Paid & social campaigns
LinkedIn, display ads and email artwork built as a set, so a campaign can run for months without fatigue.
04
Sales decks & proposals
The awkward slide — the one explaining how it all fits together — drawn properly, once.
05
Website & product art
Heroes, section spots and empty states that keep a long page moving and a product feeling considered.
06
Explainer diagrams
Architecture, process and journey diagrams that survive being shown to a non-technical buyer.
How it works
From brief to artwork
in four steps.
With these concise steps in place we can go from concept to finished artwork without the headache of multiple revision cycles.
01
Proposition brief
We’d interrogate what has to be understood, by whom, and at which stage of the journey and make sure that is translated into an illustrative visual language for your brand from the start.
02
Concepts
Two or three illustration routes – different styles, different potential metaphors, all as rough sketches – nothing polished in this initial stage.
Once you have chosen a potential concept, we’d present a more polished version so it’s immediately clear that it stands up as a working visual.
03
Artwork
After this concept has been reviewed and approved by your team, the chosen route will be worked up in full, either as a set or stand alone illustration.
04
Handover
Finally, source files will be exported in the formats you need, ready to use.
“
We have been working closely with Sharp Ahead for nearly four years, and they have helped transform our digital marketing. In the past year alone, we have seen more than a 20% increase in lead generation. As we continue on our wider digital transformation journey, I value our partnership with Sharp Ahead immensely.”
Kate Perrin
Group Marketing Director, Barbour ABI
Frequently Asked Questions
The practical bits.
Anything not covered here, ask us on the call – we’ll give you the answers you need.
How long does a bespoke illustration take?
There’s no one size fits all for this and purely depends on the style of illustration and the scale of the project. However, once a style is established, additional spots and campaign variants come through much faster. Get in touch and we can discuss in further detail.
Can you work within our existing brand guidelines?
That’s the usual starting point. We work to your palette, type and tone, and where guidelines stop short of illustration we’ll propose a style and document it so everyone stays consistent.
Our product is genuinely complicated. Can you draw it?
Complicated is the interesting part. We’ve illustrated compliance journeys, satellite data pipelines and multi-week implementation programmes – always with a technical review before artwork is signed off.
What formats do we receive?
This can depend on the illustration style. Usually it’s scaleable vector like SVG, but for others that could be JPG, PNG and WebP exports at the sizes you need – web, print, LinkedIn, display and slides – named so your team can find them.
Once you've created the visual language for our brand will it be used solely for us?
Yes absolutely. We never reuse an illustration for another brand. We believe when we create an illustrated visual language for a client that it becomes an integrated part of your brand identity, one that you’ll want to use going forward across many different touchpoints.
Written By
Gary Lees, Illustrator at Sharp Ahead
Award-winning illustrator, with more than 20 years of commercial illustration experience helping organisations find their own unique visual voice.
Trust us to bring it to life
If you have a proposition you’re struggling to explain or a new campaign you want prospects to uniquely identify to your brand, book a consultation with us and we can discuss it in more depth.
