Corporate illustrative style: when it is needed and how to set it
When a business really needs its own illustrations
A custom illustrative style is not always justified — it is an expensive solution, and investing in it without a reason is wasteful. There are three moments in a company's lifecycle when illustrations solve the task better than photos or icons.
- Product launch. Illustrations explain an abstract concept faster — how a cloud storage, a financial service, or B2B-platform works, which cannot be photographed.
- Rebranding. Changing the visual language through illustrations signals the market of changes more clearly than changing a font or a logo.
- Sales and training materials. When a complex process needs to be explained — from onboarding in an app to the device of an antivirus — illustrations simplify the abstraction into a comprehensible image.
In line with the type of business, illustrative style is especially needed for digital products with non-visualizable services (fintech, IT, insurance), medical and educational brands, where photos of people evoke a stock feeling, and brands with emotional positioning — such as Dropbox and MailChimp, which transitioned to a systematic illustrative style to create an emotional connection with the audience.
Illustrations, photos or icons: how to choose
A common mistake among brands is perceiving illustrations as a substitute for a photo 'for beauty.' In reality, each visual language has its own area of responsibility, and mixing them up means wasting the budget unnecessarily.
| Criterion | Photography | Illustration | Icon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task | Show reality, evoke trust through credibility | Explain abstraction, create emotion and uniqueness | Fast navigation, minimal meaning |
| When choosing | Physical product, credibility is important (food, real estate) | Digital or complex product, conceptualization is needed | Interface, where illustration is excessive |
| Cost of scaling | High — filming is needed for each medium | Medium — a library of elements accelerates the process | Low — simple geometry |
| Risk of obsolescence | High — people, trends, and locations change | Low — style lives for years with proper guidelines | Medium |
Illustrations are chosen when photos cannot convey the essence of the offer — the work of an algorithm, a financial flow, data protection. Photos are chosen when the authenticity of the object is important. Mixing them in one communication system without a clear rule of where to apply what is a typical reason for visual inconsistency in young brands.
Case of Kaspersky Lab: how a working guideline looks in practice
Kaspersky Lab went down a path worth examining in detail because it shows the balance between freedom and control. The company developed a 40-page guideline with a library of ready-made graphic elements — characters, objects, and backgrounds. This is not an aesthetic solution but an economic one: the library reduced the time and cost of developing new illustrations by years ahead because designers do not need to reinvent the form each time.
A separate section of the guideline — background limitation. To adapt between posters, billboards, and interfaces, the company chose only four basic backgrounds: white, gray, green, and black. This limitation may seem modest, but it is precisely what keeps the style recognizable when transitioning from a smartphone screen to a billboard — the eye catches onto the recurring color logic faster than the character's shape.
What is necessarily to fix in the guideline
The main question that many materials overlook is: how many style elements are sufficient to prevent illustrations from dispersing in the hands of different executors, yet not turn into a rigid constructor devoid of creative freedom. Practice shows: excessive detail in the guidelines kills the liveliness of illustrations just as quickly as the absence of such detail kills recognizability.
The minimal working set of rules that should be documented:
- Shapes and geometry. Rounded corners, figure proportions, acceptable degree of stylization — realistic or abstract.
- Lines and contours. Stroke thickness, presence or absence of a contour, style of hatching.
- Color palette. A limited set of shades — as in VK, where illustrations are united by a single color scheme regardless of the subject.
- The dynamics of poses and composition. The rule of smooth forms and liveliness of characters, as in the VK guideline, not static figures.
- Textures and materials. Is there grain, gradients, patterns — or a strictly flat style.
- A library of ready-made elements. A set of characters, objects and scenes that can be combined without creating new ones from scratch — like at Kaspersky Lab.
Six points are sufficient for 90% of cases. If the guideline expands to describe every pose and facial expression — this is a signal that the team is trying to replace the creative process with documentation, rather than guide it.
Scaling without loss of recognizability
An illustration drawn for an app icon and the same illustration on a billboard — different tasks from the perspective of perception. The key tool here is a system of contour thickness ratios for different types of graphics: narrative illustrations, mini-illustrations and product icons. Without this system, an illustration either loses details when scaled down, or looks loose when scaled up.
- Divide the library into three levels of complexity: detailed narrative scenes (for landing pages, presentations), simplified mini-illustrations (for cards, email) and pictogram icons (for the interface).
- For each level, fix a separate line thickness — it should not scale proportionally to size, otherwise on a large medium the contour will become too thin, and on a small one — it will merge into a blob.
- Check the illustration at the minimum real usage size — favicon or push notification icon — before finalizing the style, not after launch.
- Limit the number of backgrounds, as Kaspersky Lab did, so that the color logic remains recognizable when transitioning between media, even without the details of the drawing.
Mistakes that destroy style when scaling
Most failures of illustrative style occur not at the development stage, but at the stage of transfer to contractors and branches — where the guideline is read by a person who did not participate in its creation.
- A guideline without a library of elements. Describing principles without ready-made samples forces each new executor to interpret the style in their own way — recognizability blurs after two or three cycles of contractors.
- Lack of rules for non-standard plots. The guideline covers typical cases, but remains silent on how to draw rare situations — the branch has to come up with a solution on its own, and it falls out of the system.
- Ignoring the minimum size. The style is tested on a large screen and is not checked on an icon — when reduced, details blur, and the character turns into a spot.
- Copying someone else's style without adapting it to one's own palette. Adopting trendy flat design or risograph techniques without tying them to the brand's colors and form makes the illustration look beautiful, but not recognizable specifically as your brand.
- Overloading the guideline with details. When a document describes 15-20 parameters instead of 6-7 key ones, contractors either ignore part of the rules or spend time on negotiations instead of working.
Developing an illustrative style is justified only if the decision is made consciously — tailored to a specific product task, not because "it looks good at competitors." A guideline that fits into six to seven fixed parameters with a ready-made library of elements lives for years and saves the budget on every new medium — this is how the system works at Kaspersky Lab and VK.
When a business really needs its own illustrations
A custom illustrative style is not always justified — it is an expensive solution, and investing in it without a reason is wasteful. There are three moments in a company's lifecycle when illustrations solve the task better than photos or icons.
- Product launch. Illustrations explain an abstract concept faster — how a cloud storage, a financial service, or B2B-platform works, which cannot be photographed.
- Rebranding. Changing the visual language through illustrations signals the market of changes more clearly than changing a font or a logo.
- Sales and training materials. When a complex process needs to be explained — from onboarding in an app to the device of an antivirus — illustrations simplify the abstraction into a comprehensible image.
In line with the type of business, illustrative style is especially needed for digital products with non-visualizable services (fintech, IT, insurance), medical and educational brands, where photos of people evoke a stock feeling, and brands with emotional positioning — such as Dropbox and MailChimp, which transitioned to a systematic illustrative style to create an emotional connection with the audience.
Illustrations, photos or icons: how to choose
A common mistake among brands is perceiving illustrations as a substitute for a photo 'for beauty.' In reality, each visual language has its own area of responsibility, and mixing them up means wasting the budget unnecessarily.
| Criterion | Photography | Illustration | Icon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task | Show reality, evoke trust through credibility | Explain abstraction, create emotion and uniqueness | Fast navigation, minimal meaning |
| When choosing | Physical product, credibility is important (food, real estate) | Digital or complex product, conceptualization is needed | Interface, where illustration is excessive |
| Cost of scaling | High — filming is needed for each medium | Medium — a library of elements accelerates the process | Low — simple geometry |
| Risk of obsolescence | High — people, trends, and locations change | Low — style lives for years with proper guidelines | Medium |
Illustrations are chosen when photos cannot convey the essence of the offer — the work of an algorithm, a financial flow, data protection. Photos are chosen when the authenticity of the object is important. Mixing them in one communication system without a clear rule of where to apply what is a typical reason for visual inconsistency in young brands.
Case of Kaspersky Lab: how a working guideline looks in practice
Kaspersky Lab went down a path worth examining in detail because it shows the balance between freedom and control. The company developed a 40-page guideline with a library of ready-made graphic elements — characters, objects, and backgrounds. This is not an aesthetic solution but an economic one: the library reduced the time and cost of developing new illustrations by years ahead because designers do not need to reinvent the form each time.
A separate section of the guideline — background limitation. To adapt between posters, billboards, and interfaces, the company chose only four basic backgrounds: white, gray, green, and black. This limitation may seem modest, but it is precisely what keeps the style recognizable when transitioning from a smartphone screen to a billboard — the eye catches onto the recurring color logic faster than the character's shape.
What is necessarily to fix in the guideline
The main question that many materials overlook is: how many style elements are sufficient to prevent illustrations from dispersing in the hands of different executors, yet not turn into a rigid constructor devoid of creative freedom. Practice shows: excessive detail in the guidelines kills the liveliness of illustrations just as quickly as the absence of such detail kills recognizability.
The minimal working set of rules that should be documented:
- Shapes and geometry. Rounded corners, figure proportions, acceptable degree of stylization — realistic or abstract.
- Lines and contours. Stroke thickness, presence or absence of a contour, style of hatching.
- Color palette. A limited set of shades — as in VK, where illustrations are united by a single color scheme regardless of the subject.
- The dynamics of poses and composition. The rule of smooth forms and liveliness of characters, as in the VK guideline, not static figures.
- Textures and materials. Is there grain, gradients, patterns — or a strictly flat style.
- A library of ready-made elements. A set of characters, objects and scenes that can be combined without creating new ones from scratch — like at Kaspersky Lab.
Six points are sufficient for 90% of cases. If the guideline expands to describe every pose and facial expression — this is a signal that the team is trying to replace the creative process with documentation, rather than guide it.
Scaling without loss of recognizability
An illustration drawn for an app icon and the same illustration on a billboard — different tasks from the perspective of perception. The key tool here is a system of contour thickness ratios for different types of graphics: narrative illustrations, mini-illustrations and product icons. Without this system, an illustration either loses details when scaled down, or looks loose when scaled up.
- Divide the library into three levels of complexity: detailed narrative scenes (for landing pages, presentations), simplified mini-illustrations (for cards, email) and pictogram icons (for the interface).
- For each level, fix a separate line thickness — it should not scale proportionally to size, otherwise on a large medium the contour will become too thin, and on a small one — it will merge into a blob.
- Check the illustration at the minimum real usage size — favicon or push notification icon — before finalizing the style, not after launch.
- Limit the number of backgrounds, as Kaspersky Lab did, so that the color logic remains recognizable when transitioning between media, even without the details of the drawing.
Mistakes that destroy style when scaling
Most failures of illustrative style occur not at the development stage, but at the stage of transfer to contractors and branches — where the guideline is read by a person who did not participate in its creation.
- A guideline without a library of elements. Describing principles without ready-made samples forces each new executor to interpret the style in their own way — recognizability blurs after two or three cycles of contractors.
- Lack of rules for non-standard plots. The guideline covers typical cases, but remains silent on how to draw rare situations — the branch has to come up with a solution on its own, and it falls out of the system.
- Ignoring the minimum size. The style is tested on a large screen and is not checked on an icon — when reduced, details blur, and the character turns into a spot.
- Copying someone else's style without adapting it to one's own palette. Adopting trendy flat design or risograph techniques without tying them to the brand's colors and form makes the illustration look beautiful, but not recognizable specifically as your brand.
- Overloading the guideline with details. When a document describes 15-20 parameters instead of 6-7 key ones, contractors either ignore part of the rules or spend time on negotiations instead of working.
Developing an illustrative style is justified only if the decision is made consciously — tailored to a specific product task, not because "it looks good at competitors." A guideline that fits into six to seven fixed parameters with a ready-made library of elements lives for years and saves the budget on every new medium — this is how the system works at Kaspersky Lab and VK.
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