Disciplines

Analytics
Naming
Brand Architecture
Look, Tone & Feel
Identity design
Interactive Media Design
Copywriting

Illustration said:

We have benefited greatly from the brand evolution and website. Both do an excellent job of communicating our heritage as a business and the quality and diversity of our artists today. The outcome is measurable in a significant increase in sales enquiries.

Harry Lyon-Smith
Managing Director
Illustration Ltd

World’s oldest illustration agency

Illustration has been representing the finest commercial artistic talent since 1929, making it the world’s oldest illustration agency. It is also the industry’s leading pioneer of customer service innovations, often utilising new technology to increase its reach well beyond its 5 international offices.

The right name

Originally known as the Kathleen Boland Studio and then Garden Studio for many years, a new management team appointed Manifest to evolve the brand to reflect their aspirations for the company. We concluded that a new name was needed to project both the long heritage of the business and equally the strong aspirations to reinforce its leadership position. We recommended renaming the company ‘Illustration’ because of the name's bold assertion of authority and confidence, an authentic expression of the corporate personality and commercial intent.

A new brand identity

We recommended that the new brand identity needed to reflect the vibrancy of the company and energy of the medium, while also referencing the long heritage of the business. The mark we developed says both in a way that is fresh yet at the same time classic – it could almost have been with the business from the start and reinterpreted for today.

Turning web traffic into more sales enquiries

Illustration’s website is around the 100,000th most visited site on the web, averaging up to 300,000 unique visitors a month. Based on a customer survey and other research, we designed user pathways and signposts through the new website which resulted in online sales enquiries increasing by 280% in the first six months.

Breaking online advertising click-through records

Illustration asked Manifest to develop an advertising campaign for use in online creative publication sites. We chose not to animate the skyscrapers and banners because we were promoting the medium of still illustration. The executions outperformed industry averages for click-through rate, with a CTR of over 6% in some cases, and broke the CTR records of several online publications.

We used analytics software to benchmark the number and quality of respondents compared to search engine advertising and found that the online ad respondents were spending four times longer on the site and twice as likely to make a sales enquiry for around 30% less cost.