Creative Chemistry: The Art of Collaboration for O&M, by Ellustrate

This was a project of cum. for Ogilvy & Mather. We were to produce the illustrations for the articles in their up and coming 11/12 issue at their DO.com webpage. The illustration for the lead article was to be 709px x 493px and it was titled, "Creative Chemistry: The Art of Collaboration". Keywords for the illustration include collaboration, creative mix, chemistry and convergence. One of the entry points into the execution was to take on the part where the article mentioned that the key reasons towards success was more than just the good mix of skills and people but also the inclusion of a strong leader with clear directions.

The idea was to have a central image that takes after the "leadership" component and to have illustrative visuals converging towards the centre. The visual elements to symbolize the chemistry and creative mix was not to take a literal standpoint but metaphors that resembles collaboration. Below is the starting sketch I did on a bus ride. I was given an apple as the central image and told to do a "tornado" that is spinning into it using my illustration style and "swirls".

Following that were versions of digital sketches with numerous revisions. Some areas of caution was to be weary of the shape of the apple turning into more of a cherry and a careful integration of the photograph into the illustration so that it does not look like it was just stuck onto the illustration. There was the option of including typography which I took out eventually to remove excessive visual factors to work with. There were also careful consideration to remove certain details and to include more "interesting" visual elements and hence the hands that resembles collaboration and teamwork. Even with the last draft, the illustration was still looking very messy with too many things everywhere.

Instructions came from the client to remove certain elements and to really simplify the whole illustration. Hence, over a good sub, the following draft was churned out where parts were carefully and instinctively removed and the rest refined further. It was with the idea of "simplifying" that the illustration finally started to work!

With the addition of a textured background and the building on and refinement of colors and strokes, the final draft was completed and sent to Ogilvy and they loved it, thankfully!

The illustration is found live on web now at http://ogilvydo.com/
Do have a read at their articles as well, rather enlightening! And for the illustration, I guess sometimes less is really more.

View more work by Elena Yeo aka ellustrate at http://ellustrate.net

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