What illustration does for a brand

Open PhonePe to book a gas cylinder and the screen may show a drawn person doing the same thing, dressed and coloured to look like the people who actually use the app. That drawing is working. A photograph would show one real customer in one real kitchen, it would date as fashions changed, and it would look much like every other stock photograph in the category. A drawing can stand for millions of users at once and still look as if one company made it. Red Hat's brand standards make the same point about software, saying that an idea such as cloud computing cannot be captured in a photo but can be captured through illustration.

Illustration does four jobs for a brand, and it pays to know which of them you are asking for. It explains, which is what a small drawing beside a line of copy is for. It shows what a camera cannot reach, such as an idea, the inside of a process or a customer you are not allowed to photograph. It holds a mood that pictures of the product alone rarely carry. And it can become recognisable in its own right, so that a stranger knows whose post it is before reading the name. That fourth job is the slowest. It only comes from drawing the same way for years, in front of the same people.

The clearest way to see these jobs is in the rules brands publish for themselves. In May 2023 PhonePe's design team wrote up Petris, the illustration library it built so that its product screens and its marketing would draw in one way. Its people are drawn to Indian proportions, adults nine heads tall and children six, in Indian skin tones and clothes, and a capsule shape the team calls the Beam sits behind them as a backdrop. Lenskart's design blog set out its own rules in April 2022. Lines are dark blue at 1.2 points, fills come only from that blue or a vivid green, each of those colours covers less than a tenth of a drawing, and the perspective stays flat with no drop shadows.

Both companies sort their drawings into two kinds, a spot illustration that sits beside a line of copy and a scene illustration that tells a small story across more of the screen. Lenskart says a spot carries more detail than an icon and works in smaller spaces. The difference matters for everything that follows. A drawing built as a scene, then shrunk to sit next to a paragraph, loses its details and turns to mud.

Brands outside India publish their rules too, and they disagree with each other in useful ways. Red Hat's small drawings, which it calls minis, use three colours, a light falling from the top left and roughly an even split of white and red. Heidelberg Materials asks for drawings that are factual and never humorous, with a basic line 1.5 points thick and people drawn at realistic proportions. Facebook went the other way. Its Alegria system, which the studio Buck began designing for it in 2017, gave people oversized limbs and skin in colours no person has, to reach what Buck calls a universal feel.

In a talk at Figma's Config conference, published in February 2020, the designer Bonnie Kate Wolf, then a senior brand designer at OpenTable, drew the line this module follows. Hiring a named illustrator for one campaign buys their personal style for that job. A house style is developed for the company itself, so that it carries on when that illustrator moves to the next client, and designers inside the company can make new drawings that still belong. A brand that needs new drawings every month needs the second far more than the first.

This module teaches the house style, how to choose one and how to keep it alive. Style comes first. The next lesson chooses one that suits the brand and survives being copied by your own team, and after it the module draws in vector from a sketch, builds characters from simple shapes and asks what makes a mascot something other people can draw. It puts icons on one grid with one stroke. Then it writes the rules into a short style guide a stranger could follow. Procreate, the iPad drawing app, gets a lesson of its own, and so does AI, as an assistant with real rights questions attached. The last lesson walks through a small set of spot drawings for No. 4, the face oil from Kochi used across this site, and then hands the same steps to you.