2018, Wow, OK, That Went Fast! Merry Christmas!

2018 went so fast and it was our 11th official year of serving our members; we don’t know about you, but we consider that an accomplishment. This year has been an amazing year and we can’t quite believe it’s nearly over with 2019 just being round the corner.

Over the last several months we introduced the Art Card Collections, which replaced our Mail Shot Packs. We were a little worried our illustrators wouldn’t take to them, but we shouldn’t have been concerned as they’ve been a big success and everyone loves them. In the new year we’ll hopefully be expanding the program to allow clients to order cards that they’re missing and let the general public to get in on the action.

We also announced our 2019 exhibition which will be at The Framers Gallery in London in April and will feature many of our talented members. For the first time this won’t be a showcase of our illustrators’ previous commissions, but will be a collection of new and creative works inspired by Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires series of books. We’re very excited about the show and can’t wait to start showing off some of the amazing pieces we know our members are going to create! Read more: Amazing Adventures: An Exhibition of Art Inspired by the Works of Jules Verne.

And last, but not least we started our Artist in “Virtual” Residence (AiR) program. So far we’re on artist number two (Nathan Shelton) with several more lined up for the coming months. What this entails is working with a specific artist over a 1-2 month period who fulfils our creative needs and creates some cool merchandise for us too during the process. Working directly with the artists has been so much fun and I wish we’d started doing this years ago. A big thank you goes out to Tom Martin for being our first AiR and the test subject for the initiative.

During the following dates we’ll be operating a skeleton crew with regards to job requests and members’ questions… and our laptops will be turned off completely if we find we’ve eaten too much Christmas pudding or become a little too intoxicated during the family gatherings.

24th December 2018 – 1st January 2019

Wishing you all happy holidays,
Darren & Jane Di Lieto

The festive snowmen were created by “AiR” Nathan Shelton. Merry Christmas Nathan! 👋

Member Note: Please be aware that news submitted over Christmas and the New Year period may not be published on the site until 2nd January and there is normally a little bit of a back(yule)log.

Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas

Posted by Darren Di Lieto

2017 has been a fantastic year and we’re already planning for 2018. We can’t wait to share with you what we’ve been working on… Showcase 2, hint, hint! As you can probably imagine, we are very excited about the coming year and the sooner it gets here the better. But before it does, it’s time for a short break to recharge the batteries. During the following dates we’ll be operating a skeleton crew with regards to job requests and members’ questions… and our laptops will be turned off completely if we find we’ve eaten too much Christmas pudding or become a little too intoxicated at the Christmas party.

24th-28th Dec followed by 31st Dec & 1st Jan.

Wishing you all happy holidays,
Darren & Jane

The wonderfully festive illustration was created by Chris Dickason – check out his portfolio for more of his amazing work! hireanillustrator.com/i/portfolio/chris-dickason

Please be aware that news submitted over Christmas and the New Year period may not be published on the site until 2nd January and there is normally a little bit of a back(yule)log.

Out With The Old, In With The New

Posted by Darren Di Lieto

2017 will be our tenth year in business and it finally feels like we’ve hit our stride! This year has been a fantastic year for us and our members; job requests are way up, social interactions are continuing to rise and member satisfaction has never been better. We relaunched our website with an improved interface and administration, and knuckled down on improving our social media presence with more regular updates and the inclusion of more videos. We simply took advantage of what was available to us to further our reach and improve the efficiency our service. Our clients and members are happy, which means we’ve been doing a good job.

What was important to us in 2016 was building our community and really making every single one of our members feel like they were part of HAI. We did more portfolio reviews than we’ve ever done before and responded to twice as many emails as we did in 2015. We even sent out a customer satisfaction survey that received a very positive response. By highlighting the things people had issues with and where we could make improvements, the survey shaped and dictated the website maintenance schedule for the subsequent months, as well as letting us know the areas members wanted us to continue to focus on. However, primarily the survey gave us a greater impression of the love our members have for the HAI community and what we do.

This year we worked as hard as we could to make HAI as effective as possible and we will continue to put in maximum effort during 2017. Next year is going to be bigger and better, we have no doubt about that. We’re looking forward to a new year and our tenth anniversary and we hope you are too. During the following dates we’ll be operating a skeleton crew with regards to job requests and members’ questions… and our laptops will be turned off completely if we find we’ve eaten too much Christmas pudding or become a little too intoxicated.

24th-28th Dec followed by 31st Dec & 1st Jan.

Wishing you all happy holidays,
Darren & Jane

Image Credit: Eugene Smith

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

Posted by Jane Di Lieto-Danes

Well, we can hardly believe it’s that time of year again already! It’s been another super-busy year and we have had the privilege of working with so many fantastic illustrators, animators and clients over the past 12 months. 2016 will see even more things happening, including a faster, swisher and generally more fabulous website, and we’ve also started planning the next Showcase 100 exhibition, which we’re very excited about!

We’ll still be working over the holidays to help with job enquiries, but may be a bit slower to respond on the following dates due to an excess of mince pies and Christmas cake:

24th, 25th & 26th December
31st & 1st January

Please note that any other non-urgent emails will be replied to as soon as possible over the holidays, but it may take a wee bit longer for us to answer than usual. Also, please be aware that news submitted over Christmas and the New Year period may not be published on the site until 2nd January.

We wish everyone an extremely Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

The wonderfully festive illustration at the top is by Kevin Myers – check out his portfolio for more of his amazing work!

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy 2015!

Posted by Jane Di Lieto-Danes

It’s been a fantastic year at Hire an Illustrator and we would like to wish all our members a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year! We’d also like to say a big thank you to all of the clients who’ve worked with and hired our illustrators over the period; may 2015 be a fantastic year for you too.

We will be operating a reduced service from 23rd December until 3rd January. This is due to reindeer playing havoc with the air traffic control and a Tribble-style infestation of Christmas puddings. Hopefully the abundance of mulled wine should solve these festive issues without compounding any Jack Frost problems.

Enjoy the holidays and we’ll be back bigger and better with a few notable changes in 2015! Ho, ho, ho and Finlay the office mascot says woof!

A special thank you to the very lovely Elly Walton, who has kindly lent us the above image. You can see lots more of Elly’s gorgeous work in her portfolio. 🙂

Santa, Snowmen & Reindeer, it must be the Christmas Mail Packs!

Posted by Jane Di Lieto-Danes

The order of members’ (mostly) seasonal postcards for the final mail packs of this year have just arrived from the printer! We’ve also had some nice Christmassy ones sent to us directly from members, so the mail packs will be full of festive cheer.

We’ll be busy getting everything organised and posting out the sample cards to the illustrators today, then we’re ready to start putting the mail packs together next week. Once these have been sent out to clients, we’ll be holding back on sending any more mail packs until around mid-January to give everyone time to get back into the swing of work again.

It’s twenty days until Christmas and we hope everyone’s looking forward to it. We know we are!

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Happy Holidays!

Posted by Jane Di Lieto-Danes

So, as we seem to have survived the Mayan Apocalypse, we’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We hope that you all have a lovely time over the Holidays and look forward to a fantastic 2013!

– the hire an illustrator team