When Custom Illustration Becomes a Brand Asset
When done right, custom illustration is a functional design tool that solves a problem stock assets can’t touch—differentiation.
Do you think of illustration as decoration? Something to fill white space, add colour, or make a page feel less sterile? In our experience, custom illustrations are often one of the first things clients ask to cut when budgets tighten, often opting for stock photography or icons instead.
The challenge with stock assets
We saw the alternative play out clearly on a recent project for Brio Insurance, a Manitoba-based brokerage with branches across the province.
Look at almost any insurance company’s website and you’ll see the same handful of images: a family in front of a house, a couple reviewing paperwork, a hand holding a phone.
These photos aren’t wrong, but they aren’t anyone’s either. They could belong to any insurance company in any town or province.
Brio already had an asset in Petey, a hand-drawn bird who’d been living quietly in their logo for years. He just hadn’t been given anything to do.
Extending the mascot into a brand story
Rather than treat Petey as a static logo mark, our graphic designers brought him to life with a full illustrative story, one scene for every insurance line on the site. Petey riding a motorcycle for motorcycle insurance. Petey packing a suitcase for travel insurance. Same linework throughout, so every illustration feels like it belongs to the same hand and the same brand.
That consistency is what makes an illustration system genuinely differentiating, in a way a stock icon set never can.
Here’s why:
It’s unmistakably one brand’s
Competitors typically lean on similar stock photography, and even stock icon sets can be found on a dozen other sites with a different logo swapped in. Petey is Brio’s alone. No competitor can license the same bird.
It’s doing double duty
Smaller elements pulled from the larger illustrations became the icons in the site’s Quick Links bar. A stock icon set can point a visitor to “Auto Insurance.” Only Brio’s own illustration can point to Auto Insurance and remind a visitor whose site they’re on at the same time.
It differentiates on tone
Brio’s brand voice is warm and neighbourly rather than corporate. A stock icon of a car communicates “auto insurance.” A hand-drawn bird riding a motorcycle communicates “auto insurance, and also, this is what it feels like to work with us.” That second layer is what a licensed asset can never carry, because it wasn’t made for this brand specifically.
The differentiator you already own
If your brand already has a mascot, icon, or visual motif sitting unused in a logo or a piece of print collateral, there’s likely a whole illustration system waiting to be built out of it. It’s rarely wasted effort. It’s usually an underused asset. Reach out to our team and find out how we can turn your logo into a full brand identity system with custom illustration and graphics.