At the beginning of 2019, we partnered with Sureify to develop a unique illustration style and create illustrations for their new marketing site. The project spanned a couple of months and we developed a lasting friendship that continues to this day with a range of different projects. Below you'll learn more about our partnership and how we created their illustration style.
Whenever we start developing an illustration style, we try to provide 2-3 unique styles for the client. For Sureify, we crafted three styles, each of which worked well with their brand and the site they were looking to create.
As we've done in other projects, the first thing we focused on was crafting the people or characters that would be used throughout the illustrations. Each of the three unique styles had three equally unique character styles as well.
The reason we use people as the jumping-off point?They’re usually constant throughout illustrations. If you have one person or character within one of your illustrations, chances are they will pop up quite often.
Once we had the people nailed down, we started thinking about their environment. In the gallery below, you'll see a couple of the options we created for the Sureify team.
Ultimately, they went with both of the options, which isn't always the case. Once we created the style and color palette, it was time to start crafting their illustrations for their actual website.
Once we had their style nailed down, it was time for us to tackle all of Sureify's illustrations and icons they needed for their new website that was being built in tandem with our project. We had four pages that we needed to craft illustrations for, and the total number of illustrations was pretty impressive.
We needed to craft close to 30 illustrations and icons total for the new site — daunting, yes, but doable for us in the timeframe we had.
Early on, we developed a steady rhythm with Sureify's Art Director and were able to jump on calls with him whenever we needed to share or ask questions. This helped the process tremendously and saved us multiple times from going down the wrong direction on a few illustrations.
At the end of the project, we had created not only the full 30 illustrations and icons we needed to develop but over 100 different variations, edits, and pivots along the way.
Upon the completion of our first project together, we had worked with the Sureify team for close to three months. As I mentioned above, we have now worked together on three additional projects.
The first version of Sureify's new marketing site launched in July 2019 and within a few months showed a massive increase in traffic. Anders Houston, Sureify's art director, told us he believes the illustrations we crafted together ultimately pushed the massive increase in interest to their site.
Here’s what he says about the impact of the new site and illustrations: "Upon the launch of the website we saw a 2,000% increase in traffic and a decreased bounce rate of around 200%. The illustrations and updates to our palette proved instrumental in helping us distill complex stories into easy-to-understand graphics."
In the time that we have worked with Sureify, we have learned so much about what they do and how they work best, and we believe our partnership will continue and grow over the coming years.
“It was an absolute pleasure working with Blue Cyclops Design Co. on this project and we’ve already started multiple additional projects based on the professionalism, high-quality output and success of our initial project. 10/10.”
Head of Design, Sureify
