KPMG’s Management Consulting team had a practical communication problem: there were many official channels available to partners and employees, but the framework explaining them was dense and difficult to grasp as a whole.
The starting point was essentially a PowerPoint containing the different channels and the information associated with each one. I worked with KPMG to clean up and simplify that content before thinking about the visual treatment.
See the whole system, not another list
A conventional diagram would still have felt like a list of channels. Instead, I proposed showing the workplace from an isometric, eagle-eye perspective.
That gave us one environment in which people could be shown actually using different forms of communication — joining a call, accessing information online, attending a briefing or participating in a meeting. The channels could be grouped naturally around the way work happened rather than treated as isolated boxes.
Build it from the real workplace
I developed the concept and worked closely with an illustrator who specialised in isometric illustration. We used photographs and visual references from KPMG’s actual office so the environment felt recognisable rather than like a generic corporate scene.
My role was to hold the information and the visual idea together: simplifying the source material, deciding how it should be organised, directing the visual system and working with the illustrator as the piece developed.
A visual system that could travel
After the Management Consulting infographic was completed, KPMG asked us to adapt the approach for Risk Consulting. The second piece used the same underlying visual language while reflecting a different set of internal communication and collaboration channels.
The repeat commission was useful confirmation that the idea worked as more than a one-off illustration. It had become a reusable way of making an otherwise abstract communications framework easier to understand.