The illustration library at Red Hat only a short time ago was fairly non-existent. Illustrations were created on a case by case basis, resulting in illustrations with wide variation in style and metaphor usage scattered throughout random folders on the share drive. Looking for a graphic to match with a specific topic for something like a social media post was time consuming, and the lack of consistency in style across social feeds was evident.

Then in 2019, Red Hat rebranded.

With the rebrand, we had a new logo, but other visual identity systems like secondary colors, photography, and illustration still reflected our old brand.

So, we had two problems. We needed to refine our work from the Open Brand Project into a sustainable and replicable illustration style, and we had a huge demand for getting those new illustrations into circulation, replacing the outdated ones.

With a rough style frame and a list of topics, we first worked closely with account and project managers to prioritize. They ensured that the highest priority needs were being addressed, and also that what was being created first had a direct use case. They pulled real data from topic page traffic on redhat.com, and kept an eye on things like upcoming events, product launches, and incoming requests.

Account and project managers also helped us establish an agency partner to take on some of the illustration load under our art direction. They also helped to set a consistent cadence for developing batches of illustrations and publishing them to our company wide repository.

We worked closely with the corporate social media team to align on shared documentation of all of our assets and streamline review process. We took this opportunity with them to reinforce our creative intake process and cut down on one-off and rogue requests that decreased our bandwidth to work on the larger library.

To address the problem of lack of consistency and need for refinement in our illustrations, we spun up two workstreams: one to refine the many variations in our illustration style, and one to align on consistent visual representation of each of our tech topics.

To refine our style, we gathered as many illustrations we could think of and started identifying what was working, what wasn’t, and what was different between those two. We did a lot of exercises like the one below, where we took a few illustrations that all looked different, and then made small changes until they all looked cohesive with one another and with our other illustrations. We documented the changes we made, and were able to give more helpful feedback to others creating illustrations so that everything started to go in a similar direction.

To refine metaphors, the team gathered illustrations pertaining to each tech topic, and used the icon as a foundation for the other illustrations pertaining to that topic. In this example below, you can see that the representation of containers in each illustration has been changed to match the hexagon shape of the icon, rather than having some hexagons, some squares, and some shipping containers here and there.

The final result from these efforts was a library where we have consistent visual representation within each topic, and a consistent style across all of those topics. Oh, and a LOT of illustrations to choose from. Which means a more cohesive external facing brand, and less time reacting to one-off requests and more time spent on looking forward to what’s next and trying new things to keep evolving and improving.

To make all of these assets easily accessible to Red Hat associates, we set up a shared google drive with illustrations organized by topic. Because it can be time consuming to click through individual folders and downloading assets that don’t have previews, we also created a corresponding deck that acts as a sort of catalog. Each slide corresponds to a topic and has thumbnail previews of the illustrations, labeled according to their names in the google drive.

This was especially helpful for our corporate social media team, who often have a post ready but need a graphic aligned to the copy to accompany it. So rather than digging through files or putting in an urgent request for a graphic, they have quick and easy access to a library that covers most of their needs.