Brand | Illustration | Climate | Large Format | Environmental Consultancy
JBA 30 Year Anniversary Illustration
JBA Consulting have spent thirty years working with water. Flood risk, drainage, climate adaptation, coastal resilience — their anniversary needed an illustration that could hold all of that without flattening it.
The brief involved a lot of listening. I sat in on calls with senior members of the team while they talked through the business: how it had grown, how it was structured, what they wanted to say about thirty years. My job was to take in as much as possible, as fast as possible, and find a way to make it visual.
Five concepts went into the first presentation. A landscape/map approach, A graphic novel-style storyboard. An editorial “big questions” piece. A living archive. And a wildcard: a proper artwork, an amphora painted in the spirit of Grayson Perry, corporate art rather than illustrated infographic, with stories and images worked into the surface. All of them had something. The landscape route won because it could show JBA’s work in context rather than in isolation, and we borrowed the editorial quality of the big questions concept and folded that in.
The final piece has five distinct landmasses, each built around one of JBA’s core values, arranged so the connections between them are part of the story. Blues, greens, a pop of yellow. It’s packed with detail: thirty years of achievement, the texture of a business with decades of expertise. And hidden in there, if you look: a woman with a pint of Guinness, someone doing an Iron Man, the office dog. The people who know, know.
The finished illustration was printed at A0 and displayed across JBA’s offices. Their in-house team also used it as the centrepiece of a film about the project.
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If you’ve got a project that needs clear, human-centred design, illustration, branding or a combo of all three, I’d love to work with you.