Brand illustrations
About the project
A major project of mine whilst at Conversocial was to empower their branding further with illustration assets that were unique for the industry but could be replicated by other designers.
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In this case study, I will be showing my year-long process of how a suitable illustration style came to be with UX methods and my prior design and illustration knowledge. The illustrations were used from late 2019 to early 2022 when Conversocial was acquired by Verint. The project was led by me with the guidance and input of the design team and the Marketing Director.
The problem
Conversocial had a problem. A branding problem.
It was the wild west throughout marketing to product.
Thankfully the new design team had been working hard on fixing that and finally making this starter company have a focused, visual identity.
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A year into the rebranding project it had been decided that an illustrator was needed to help complete the branding.
This is where I come in.
The approach
In order for this project to be successful I needed the
goals below to be achieved:
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Discover who the target groups are and what their
needs are.
Analysis who our competitors are, what they are
doing and what we can learn from them.
Research and then build a system that will
improve efficiency.
THE WINDOW-WALL OF AFFINITY MAPPING!
The designs
After attending a couple of illustration-relevant events to gain further visual inspiration, I began sketching potential style candidates to present.
Once a style was approved by the necessary stakeholders, I then built a library in Adobe Illustrator that would be the single source of truth for all designers.
In this library, users were able to build, pose and reference characters to their liking and use them where needed whilst being brand accurate.
EARLY SKETCHES
FINISHED LIBRARY EXAMPLE
Hero images for
2021 website
BEGAN WITH
PERSONA MAKING
GET INSPIRED!
1%
Decrease in average
bounce rate
8%
Rise on time
per page
Conclusion
The project was incredibly successful in-house, with customers and prospects enjoying the new look. Design efficiency had greatly increased too because there were now guidelines to follow when adding consistency illustrative touches to materials.
Next steps?
A project began where users of the Conversocial product could build a personalized avatar of themselves to then use throughout the product to represent them but due to an acquisition, this project was no longer needed.
"Illustrations strengthens the Brand, not over shadow it"
6/6 interviewees
The research
Once I identified our personas, I moved on
to SWOT analysis of our direct competitors illustration branding (whether they had one or not) and stakeholder interviews where interviewees worked in the Marketing, Design, and Sales departments within the company. Each interview
took between 30-40 minutes and covered four categories that asked questions on; Brand, Customers, Systems, and Deliverables.
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Thanks to this research I was able to focus
on the messaging of what the brand illustrations
needed to say.
They needed to tell both Conversocials and customer stories. Aligning with the company's
goal at the time, we had to think about their customer's experiences and how Conversocial wished to make messaging human and friendly,
with the collaboration of agents and chatbots.
The results
The biggest achievement of this project was producing a personalized illustration style that could be easily replicated even by designers who did not have an illustration-centric background.
We also gained a positive reaction from marketing events, merch, and material remarking on how identifiable the brand had become.
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Once this side of branding was complete, we implemented it onto the website which triggered a soft rebrand of the site. This led to positive improvements in website metrics including views, bounce rate, and time spent sitewide.
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Example being, 2020 saw:
14%
Rise in page views
CONVENTION ADVENTURES!