Accelerating Brand Illustration with AI

When the Employee Communications team at Indeed needed 30 custom illustrations for an internal campaign, the math didn't work. Our in-house illustrators create beautiful work, but dedicating weeks of their time to illustrations for a non-revenue-generating channel wasn't sustainable. We needed to find a way to maintain our distinctive paper cut illustration style while making the production process more efficient.

As Creative Technologist, I led the parallel evaluation of three different AI technologies that could help us automate illustration production without compromising quality.

Testing and Learning in Parallel

A LoRA model paired with ComfyUI offered the highest potential accuracy in replicating our paper cut style. In theory, we could achieve remarkably faithful reproductions if the model was properly trained. However, the investment required for setup and iteration made this approach impractical for our timeline.

A trained model in Pencil met our compliance requirements and was already part of the team's toolset, but the tech struggled with consistency and quality. While it offered a compliant solution, the underlying model (Bria 2.3) couldn't match the sophistication of our paper cut style.

A Gemini Gem provided the best balance of quality and usability. A custom Gem built on Google's Gemini chat interface allowed us to create illustrations that stayed true to our brand style with minimal technical overhead. The interface was accessible to our design team and the results were consistently high quality.

The Gemini Gem emerged as the clear winner – with one important caveat.

The Gem produced human forms without distortion. It reliably matched our brand style with strong adherence to the paper cut technique that makes it ownable to Indeed. Character poses were also natural and dynamic. Finally, the Gem had, by far, the most sophisticated and on brand color palettes of all the tools tested.

But character faces were still a challenge. The Gem's facial features were generic and couldn't match our brand style.

We embraced this limitation as an opportunity for human collaboration. Designers used AI to establish the scene, color palette, and character pose, then manually added and refined faces. This hybrid approach allowed us to produce an on-brand character illustration in about 30 minutes and non-character illustrations in about 15 minutes.

The Workflow

• Briefing in Asana: In-house producers field illustration requests from the Employee Comms team with requirements and reference materials
• Generation in Gemini Gem: Designers use natural language prompts to craft illustrations
• Refinement in Figma: Illustrations are imported, facial features and background shapes are added,, and paper texture is applied
• Delivery via Asana: Final assets are delivered back to the requesting team

This hybrid approach preserves the designer's role in quality control and finishing while using AI to handle the time-intensive initial creation phase. The result is illustrations that maintain our brand standards in a fraction of the time.

Finished Illustrations

The Impact

By automating the production of custom brand illustration with AI, we transformed what would have been weeks of manual illustration work into a scalable, efficient process. The Employee Communications team got the 30 custom illustrations they needed, our design team learned new workflows that they can apply to future projects, and we established a framework for thoughtfully integrating AI tools into creative production.

This project showed our team that AI doesn't have to replace creative work. Instead, it can augment it, handling the heavy lifting while designers focus on the refinement and craft that makes illustrations distinctively Indeed.