Mendola Artists Give Our Followers a Look at All the Creativity Behind the Business of Illustration

What was your priority for this takeover?
My priority was to promote our talented artists as much as possible. We presented 38 artists within our takeover, focusing on the following themes: Advertising/Animation, Packaging Design/Kids Toys, Hand-Lettering/Publishing, Infographic/Editorial. Since this was our first Instagram takeover, and we’re the first illustration agency to takeover Workbook’s Instagram account, we didn’t really have anything to reference. I looked at Martin Gee’s takeover and was impressed with how much personality came across in his posts—he was very entertaining. We wanted to be sure we had this element in our takeover as well. Sara Barnes from Brown Paper Bag was also an inspiration, as she has managed to build quite the fan base through her illustration blog. I personally follow her blog and wanted to mimic her idea of “good illustration.” Overall, we wanted to make sure it was something that would be memorable but would tell the Mendola Art story.

How did your prepare for the takeover?
When first approached to do the takeover by Thomas James, the social media manager at Workbook, I was excited but incredibly nervous. Thomas was reassuring and as helpful as could be throughout the entire process. He even gave us an extra day to promote our artists. I sat down with Tim Mendola, president of our company, to identify themes that would be best for showcasing our artist’s work to Workbook’s 14K+ Followers. With so many artists, variety was important, but we didn’t want to overdo it. I’m still not sure if we did, but I’m truly hoping the viewers got something out of it. We selected popular projects that our artists were really proud of, such as the Shameless Project by Luke Lucas, Steve’s Perry’s Traces Album artwork by Jeff Wack, Game of Thrones illustrations for HBO by Rob Ball, and the “Let’s Talk” Campaign run by Mental Health UK with hand lettering by Kate Forrester. Artists like Amanda Lima & Katt Phatt shared their sketches and processes, so I was able to make individual videos. We also conducted Skype interviews with some international artists, and local artists came into the office to meet with us. It took a great deal of preparation, but wasn’t a one-person effort. A lot of people helped make this happen.

What were some of the most popular posts?
That’s a tough question. I think they were all popular for various reasons. In terms of engagement, Blind Salida’s “A Modern Man Has to Be” infographic illustration did very well, receiving more than 440 likes and 12 comments. Not surprisingly, we also received a lot of attention for Jeff Wack’s post for Steve Perry’s Traces album, and there is great anticipation to see the full interview for this project which will be coming soon! Chris Wormell’s engraving work for 1850 Coffee did well also. As for the videos, we did get a lot of views, especially for Lindsey Spinks and Jude Buffum’s posts. The last video where we had a couple of our artists give advice to aspiring illustrators was an important one to me from the beginning. We almost didn’t include it, but I’m so glad we did in the end.

What was it about them do you think that resonated with the audience?
I think BlindSalida always does very well on social media simply because their work is always clean and an easy read. Annick Poirier’s “Luxury Perfume” illustration also did very well because it was one of the simplest posts. One thing I certainly learned about this entire process was that simple is better. Had we only done videos, we would have bored people, so I learned that it’s important to include variety but also to keep it simple.

Is there anything that you would have done differently?
I would have spent more time editing our video interviews to perhaps show full interviews for Workbook. We had so much footage, but unfortunately we were limited to 60 second snippets per Instagram’s post policy. I’m truly excited to be able to show these on our Mendola Art’s Instagram TV channel, and we have received feedback from our followers to see more of the interviews as well, so we can’t wait to show those soon.