Brushless Illustrations

Brushless
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Case studyGerman marketing agency

Twenty brand languages, four hundred illustrations, six weeks.

A holding company handed its agency twenty brands to consolidate, each with an illustration style built up over years by different freelancers and written down almost nowhere. Four hundred illustrations were quoted at $240,000 and five to six months. We built a model per brand, and the programme shipped in six weeks for $8,000.

Sector
Marketing agency, Germany
Scope
20 brand systems · ~400 illustrations
Turnaround
6 weeks
Previously
$240K quoted, 5–6 months
97%reduction in production costs
5×
faster delivery per illustration
20
brands, each with its own trained model
6 wks
for all twenty systems, down from six months

All figures are actual project outcomes. Client names are withheld under confidentiality agreements.

The situation

A cluster of mismatched picture frames leaning against each other, each holding a different pattern — orange dots, pink waves, a pink spiral, orange triangles, a blue crosshatch — one brand language per frame.

Twenty brands that had to stay twenty brands.

A full-service agency in Germany — 35 people, a creative department of 12 — running campaigns for more than twenty clients across financial services and consumer goods. A holding company brought them in to consolidate and refresh the visual identity of every brand under its umbrella.

Each of those brands already had an illustration style, accumulated over years by different designers and freelancers, and most of it had never been written down. The brief was not to replace them: each brand needed a coherent illustration system that stayed unmistakably its own while reading as part of one parent, rolled out across landing pages, campaigns and internal materials.

In the traditional route that meant briefing freelance illustrators brand by brand — study the existing language, produce samples, revise, then begin the real assets. At $300 to $1,200 an illustration and three to five days each, twenty brands at fifteen to twenty-five assets apiece came to roughly four hundred illustrations.

$240,000 quoted
400 illustrations across 20 brands at about $600 each — before a single revision round.
Five to six months
Even with several illustrators working in parallel, against client commitments already made.
Style drift
Every illustrator read a brief differently, and the revision cycles that corrected it came out of the agency's margin.

What changed

Two stacks of illustrated pages side by side: one towering above a dozen sheets high, the other only three or four sheets tall.

The same four hundred illustrations, costed twice.

Both columns are the client's own figures: the left is the freelance route the agency had quoted and was about to commit to, the right is the project as delivered.

Production cost
$240,000freelance illustration fees for 400 assets, before revisions
$8,000the delivered programme, all twenty brands
Delivery timeline
5–6 monthswith several illustrators working in parallel
6 weeksall twenty brand systems, shipped on schedule
Style consistency
Variableeach illustrator interpreting an unwritten style
No driftevery output held to the model trained on that brand

What we built

Two machines side by side, each fed a different shape through its hopper — pink circles in one, green squiggles in the other — and each pouring out more of that same shape beneath it.

A model per brand, not a model for illustration.

We went brand by brand with the agency's creative team, ingesting the existing assets, the brand guidelines and the colour systems. Where a visual language had never been documented — which was most of them — we defined it with their designers before anything was trained.

What came out was twenty separate models, one per brand, each holding that brand's line weight, palette, character proportions and compositional habits. The agency's creative team then directed the output: they briefed, they chose, they refined, they signed off. The model carried the production volume. The judgment stayed exactly where it already was.

How it ran

Twenty times, in parallel, with the same five steps each. The count on the right is what the step produced across the whole programme.

  1. Audit the brand

    Existing assets, guidelines and colour systems ingested for each brand in the group.

  2. Write down the style

    The visual language defined with the agency's designers wherever it had never been documented — which is the step the freelance route skipped and paid for later in revisions.

  3. Train a model per brand

    One model each, trained on that brand's own library rather than on a general illustration style with the brand described to it in words.

  4. Direct the output

    The creative team briefed, generated, selected and refined. Nothing left the agency without a designer choosing it.

  5. Roll out

    Delivered for landing pages, campaign materials and the brands' own guideline documents.

“We were spending more time managing illustrators than doing creative work.”
Creative Director, the agency

Since

The agency has run three further client engagements through the same route, each one cutting the production timeline by more than half. The models are theirs and the brands they were trained on have not changed, so the second campaign for a brand costs what a campaign costs rather than what a setup costs.

Notes
  1. Client not named under a confidentiality agreement. The sector, the size of the team and the shape of the engagement are described because they are what the work was; nothing here narrows the description further.
  2. No illustration from this engagement is shown, and none will be. Every output is the client's own brand property in the client's own style — there is no redaction that leaves an illustration publishable the way removing a lockup leaves an ad board publishable. This page is set without visuals for that reason rather than for want of files.
  3. Figures are the client's: $240,000 and five to six months are the freelance quotes the agency was holding, and $8,000 and six weeks are the delivered project. The per-illustration rate of $300–$1,200 is the range they were quoted, not a market average.

Managing visuals across twenty brands?

We can build a model per brand and set up batch generation, so your creative team spends its time directing the work instead of producing it.