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Invest in creating your own illustrations

@jamesdavenport mentioned how he commissioned a designer to help him with some illustrations.

Looking at what was his website and I felt it really made a difference. It was almost like he believed enough in his product to invest with some love and care.

I thought I would share how I used custom designs to stand out with Ministry of Testing. To be honest I was just having a bit of fun, yet in hindsight, they were probably our best investment.

The Start of The Tester Types

In the early days of Ministry of Testing I had some illustrations of characters made up. They were a play on testers 'character' types. We had an ebook that went along with it too.

Tester Types

The more we did and grew as a business the more excuses we found to reuse the characters. Over the years people have grown to love them.

Software Testing Club

Before Ministry of Testing there was Software Testing Club. We had two websites for a while, we ended up merging them.

Here is a version of the Software Testing Club logo.

The Testing Planet Newspaper Logo

We once had a physical newspaper. The characters were embedded in the logo.

Cardboard cutouts

This photo was not staged, the person picture actually reflects the mood of the character. 🙊

A coloring book

We've actually done a few variations of this over the years. Here's one of them.

A part of almost all the content we put out

An image for one of our TestBash events.

This is from the current website

All kinds of swag

We have all sorts of stuff on our online shop. And also made stuff for our events.

Stickers. Bookmarks. Badges. Books. Tshirts. All the things!

Tattoos

Fake ones. And real ones. 😱

They've been a great investment!

  1. 3

    This was our thought when we had launched illustrationss.com to help founders design custom illustrations. Be it something human, alien, robotic, animal, or just about anything that suits the brand's personality.

  2. 3

    this is so awesome! the big characters at the conference are such a fun touch :)

  3. 3

    Design and art are severely underrated in business.

  4. 2

    Completely agree. I use original illustrations for all of my projects. I've done some myself and some commissioned. It's always better than just recycling clip art.

  5. 2

    Thanks for the mention @rosiesherry!

    I love all these examples of the illustrations for Ministry of Testing, really conveys a huge amount of character and injects a bit of fun!

    It doesn't cost too much these days to get a designer to make something bespoke for your audience, having something made just for you really pays dividends and makes your site stand out a lot more in my view.

    The dedication of getting a tattoo of them take it to a whole new level, fantastic!

  6. 1

    It really does elevate the first impression of your offering. Makes it that much more likely you'll get a click / subscribe / sale, etc. Great post :)

  7. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      I use @ThomasHarvey. He's a freelancer and we've worked together for 10+ years now!

      He did my Rosieland logo too.

      1. 2

        Thanks for the mention, Rosie - can't believe it's been 10 years now; awesome milestone - it's been a blast!

        Shameless plug for anyone that needs any design support: https://thomasharvey.design

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