Welcome to the first in a series of eight posts on the compelling reasons to choose a human illustrator over artificial intelligence (AI) for your corporate illustration project.

A wonderful thing about the human illustrator is their ability to develop a deep understanding of your specific needs. This understanding is built through their interaction with you, the client, plus a whole raft of other inputs including prior knowledge, research and experience of working with other clients in similar scenarios.

Did you know that the brain builds this understanding through a constant process building and strengthening of neural connections? Not only that, the brain also engages in synaptic pruning every now and then to ensure neural pathways are as efficient as possible. When a neural pathway is used regularly it becomes stronger, which means that your human illustrator can easily build their understanding of the information presented to them.

The human illustrator excels at homing in on your specific needs, pain points and aspirations, and knows exactly the right questions to ask to get to the core of what you need. This superpower also includes using their sharpened senses and ability to interpret your own behaviour, forming inferences about what’s important to you right now, such as landing those important organisational messages. That’s building neural connections in action!

As for the machine, it may answer the questions you ask, but will it really get to the depth of understanding the human illustrator can? We think not.

At Inky Thinking we’ve been working with a global medical business specialising in women’s health. Over several years we have partnered with our client to develop technical illustrations for a range of medical specialists, key opinion leaders and stakeholders. Our knowledge of our client's business, aspirations, products and the needs of their target customers has led to a deep understanding of what communicating visually and effectively means for them.

In Part 2 we will explore how humans can reach tailored solutions quickly; another reason why human illustrators excel over artificial intelligence.

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Banner illustrations for this blog series by Felipe.