The Fast And Easy Way To Get Amazing Graphic Design Illustrations

It’s a fact: business owners and marketing teams need a constant supply of graphic design illustrations that don’t suck. All those Unsplash images will sooner or later bite back when you notice almost everyone is using them. Not a good look.

The dilemma of many entrepreneurs is trying to choose between exorbitant prices and low quality designs. But, did you know that there’s this service that offers a sweet balance between affordable and high-quality designs? So, what is it? Is this how the most successful brands get amazing graphic design illustrations quickly and easily? We’ll tell you right here.

Table of Contents

• What is the Difference Between Graphic Design, Illustrations, and Graphic Design Illustrations?
• How Can Graphic Design Illustrations Help Your Business?
• The Different Types of Illustrations
• Plan Ahead with Your Design Strategy
• Compare Your Options
• Grab a Graphic Design Illustrations Subscription

What is the Difference Between Graphic Design, Illustrations, and Graphic Design Illustrations?

For the uninitiated, these terms may confuse: graphic design, illustrations, and graphic design illustrations. To help you get a clear understanding, here’s a brief description of each:

• Graphic design: This focuses on communicating messages visually. It uses a variety of design assets such as color, imagery, typography, and layout, among others. It is often used for marketing materials, branding, website design, and user interfaces. 
• Illustrations: These are visual representations crafted by artists. They convey ideas, tell stories, or enhance written content. They can be hand-drawn or digital and are typically seen in books, magazines, advertisements, and many others.
• Graphic Design Illustrations: These combine the elements of both graphic design and illustrations. They are tailor-made visuals that incorporate graphic design principles while keeping the artistic touch of illustrations. They are made to create unique and engaging content that stands out, making them the ideal design assets for marketing campaigns, social media, and branding.

How Can Graphic Design Illustrations Help Your Business?

Your business can gain the following benefits from graphic design illustrations:

• Enhance Your Brand Identity: Custom illustrations can help craft a distinctive and memorable brand identity, one that resonates with your target audience.
• Improve Engagement: Attention-grabbing visuals can pique interest, increase engagement, and encourage social media sharing.
• Communicate Complex Concepts: Unique illustrations can simplify and explain complex ideas visually, making them easier to understand for your viewers.
• Add Personality: Custom illustrations can add personality and character to your brand. It can give life to your marketing materials and make your brand more relatable and approachable.

The Different Types of Illustrations

For you to know what illustrations to use for your business, below is a shortlist of the different types of illustrations:

• Editorial Illustrations: These are the illustrations used in magazines, newspapers, and blogs to complement written content.
• Marketing Illustrations: These are crafted specifically for advertisements, social media posts, and promotional materials. Their main purpose is to grab attention and convey your brand message effectively.
• Infographic Illustrations: These are the visual representations of data and information to help the audience grasp complex ideas quickly.
• Character Illustrations: These are custom-made characters designed to represent a brand, product, or service to add a special touch to your marketing efforts.

Plan Ahead with Your Design Strategy

It’s a no-brainer that brands should be planning their content strategy in advance – and specifically their content calendar. Even more critical, agencies need to make sure their client work is getting done on time. The best way to ensure consistent content output and project completion is having your design process mapped out in advance.

There are ways to fuse your company’s bottom line with your customers’ wants to achieve a win-win. This is called design strategy, and every big company has at least a few team members dedicated to carrying it out.

Benefits of design strategy include:

• It cuts back on planning/execution time, as there’s no need to reinvent the wheel for each project
• It saves money, allowing you to get the most graphic design illustrations for your buck
• It keeps all stakeholders in the loop about creative direction
• It helps you see the ROI of your design investment and link design with business outcomes

When you look into the success of major companies like Apple and Microsoft, you find that their design process was central. It’s no accident that fans continue to rave about Apple’s product designs year after year. But design isn’t only relevant to tech companies or brands with physical products. Even a service-based business can thrive by putting design front and center. See some design strategy examples here.

Compare Your Options

Once you have a strategy loosely laid out, it’s time to figure out where you’ll be sourcing your designs from. This is the crux of your entire strategy. You need your graphic design illustrations to be on-budget but also up-to-par quality-wise. Here are your options:

Do It Yourself

So you’re creative and you want to try your hand at DIY design? Or maybe you run a small company and your design budget is still nonexistent. This is when you have no choice but to hurl yourself into design and see how it goes. While this will undoubtedly limit the amount and types of graphic design illustrations you produce, it might work fine for a small startup.

In this situation, you can rely on things like:

• free graphic design templates
• DIY tutorials
• batching & scheduling content
• stock illustrations
• tools like Canva

Hire a Freelancer

This is an extremely common option, especially if you only have an occasional design project to complete. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are teaming with professionals who are willing to help with one-off projects. The trickiest thing about freelance platforms is that the best designers are usually pretty busy and may not have time to focus on your brand or get projects shipped quickly.

Hire an In-House Designer

If your ideal goal is a tight-knit team that works together, hiring one or more in-house designers might be your best bet. Reaching a point where you can hire an in-house designer is cause for celebration. But remember: Just because you have all that money doesn’t mean you need to spend it. This is where a subscription service comes in handy. Plus, you save all that money you’d be spending on an in-house designer.

Subscribe to a Service

An unlimited graphic design service is probably the most hands-off of all the approaches. You are entrusting your design strategy to a team of designers outside of your company. They’ll have to get to know your brand, and it may take swapping designers a few times to find a good fit. But it often works out better than hiring a random freelancer and starting from scratch each time.

Grab a Graphic Design Illustrations Subscription

Yes, it’s that point in the article where we boast about the value of an unlimited graphic design subscription. But wait! Hear us out.

As an unlimited graphic design company, we’ve worked with thousands of brands in a variety of industries, but one thing is always the same: Leaders feel a weight lifted off their shoulders when they outsource some or all of their design tasks to us. Your time and energy is freed up to run your business (instead of micromanaging unskilled designers or trying to become a designer yourself).

Whether your design team is tied up with more important tasks or you don’t have a team at all, Penji fills the gap for you, offering unlimited graphic design illustrations from some of the best designers in the world. With 3 pricing tiers, our platform is designed to fit your current needs like a glove. Upgrade or downgrade anytime if your design output changes.

With a graphic design subscription, you get:

• as many designs as you can pack into each month
  
• unlimited revisions at no additional cost
  
• a 24-48 hour turnaround time for most designs
  
• access to many illustration design styles
  
• to talk directly with your illustration designer
  
• a simple dashboard to submit design requests in minutes
  
• the option to swap designers and get a fresh take on a project
  
• the option to upload brand guidelines and get hyper-customized graphics
  
• multiple brand folders to keep your clients or projects organized
  
• a 30-day money-back guarantee

Conclusion

Graphic design illustrations are a powerful way to level up your brand and connect with your audience. Understanding its intricacies can help you know the best approach to incorporating them in your visuals. The fastest and easiest way to get graphic design illustrations is through a reliable on-demand design service, Penji. Watch our quick demo video here or get our illustrators working via this link.