As a reader of ImageThink’s blog, you’re very likely already a proponent of leveraging visuals to strengthen your message. For over a decade, we’ve preached the gospel of thinking in images to reinforce key ideas, and make them more memorable and more easily communicated.
Using graphic facilitation and graphic recording techniques, as well as our own ImageThink Method™, we often create our work live, in real time, to support client meetings or presentations. That being said, we’ve helped countless clients communicate big ideas beautifully, leveraging pre-rendered, studio assets.
Often marketing and communications collateral is created by an internal designer or an agency partner. And while those specializations are highly skilled, there are some unseen benefits to working with a visual strategy firm, like ImageThink to craft your visual communications.
An Artist & Illustrator’s Sensibility
As defined by Mirriam-Webster, to illustrate is, “to provide with visual features intended to explain or decorate,” or, “to make clear by giving or by serving as an example or instance.”
In our experience, there are a lot of beautiful and flashy designs to encounter in the world, but too often, the message is muddled, unclear, or clumsily served. As artists and illustrators, ImageThink’s visual strategy team focuses first on the clarity of the message. They are expert listeners and synthesizers who have developed visual tools to help co-create visuals directly with our clients.
Beyond that, our proprietary training program emphasizes using color, different hand-drawn typographic styles and weights, positioning to highlight important and distinct concepts, and guide your audience’s eye through your ideas. That same hand-drawn style also serves to humanize and add a personal touch to even the most technical of topics.
A note about style: while we certainly have a house-style, there are several ways we can adapt the look and feel of our work to meet your messaging and branding needs. As we mentioned in our last ideas post, we can also animate our outputs, or isolate and iterate on specific iconography within the work that resonates with your team and stakeholders.
Deep Industry Experience
Over the last decade, ImageThinkers have been in hundreds of meetings, conferences, and corporate off sites every year, across a multitude of industries. From early idea sessions with a major automaker in Los Angeles, to high-pressure Pharma presentations in Germany, to final advertising pitches in Manhattan, we have become experts in countless nuanced fields that require precise, industry-specific language. That’s not to mention the efficiencies we developed working through a pandemic. By working digitally, we can support clients all over the globe, with visuals that are shared and edited more quickly and easily.
By learning from the best (our clients), ImageThink’s studio of visual storytellers are adept at asking the right questions, and quickly understanding the unique needs and challenges of your company. Beyond that, as visual strategists, our team is specifically trained in capturing the core message you are trying to share, and concisely and cleverly packaging it within easy-to-read and absorb illustrations.
Function & Form Combined
We’ve all seen great infographics, and awesome visuals from marketing campaigns. But how many would you frame and hang in your office? How many would you organically share on social media?
Perhaps the greatest benefit of ImageThink assets is that in addition to being informative and persuasive, they’re designed to be beautiful to look at. Our clients regularly write us to say they have framed our outputs and displayed them prominently in the office (and they usually attach the photos to prove it)!
The visuals, animations, and videos we create with clients are shared internally and externally, for training or marketing, with executive boards and prominent stakeholders. Beyond our clients, when we’re in public engagements, audiences are so frequently captivated that they document and share our work on their personal social accounts.
This organic reach is extremely valuable and increasingly rare as social media users have learned the worth of their shares. ImageThink visuals offer our clients an opportunity to see their ideas flourish beyond the walls of their own companies and industries.
Have some ideas you want to get out there? Need help taking your bullet-points or slide decks beyond text and clipart? Give us a call today, or schedule a call when it’s convenient for you, and let’s talk about how ImageThink can help!
