Brian Grimwood’s agency, from 1983.

Central Illustration Agency, often shortened to CIA, is a London agency for commercial artists founded by the British illustrator Brian Grimwood in 1983. The UK companies register lists The Central Illustration Agency Limited as incorporated on 31 May 1983. The agency’s own website greets visitors with “Welcome to CIA, since 1983”.

The agency began with a group of artists rather than a business plan. A post on the illustration blog of Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, published on 25 March 2013, described a visit by Ben Cox and Brian Grimwood, in which Cox explained how the agency came to be: the vision Grimwood had when he brought together a group of illustrators in 1983. The Design Education Talks series from New Art School, in an article published on 27 August 2025, said Grimwood founded the agency in Covent Garden with a small group of painters, printmakers and calligraphers.

Grimwood was a working illustrator before he was an agent. The 2025 article said he studied at Bromley Technical School under Owen Frampton, where David Bowie was a classmate, and that his career took in weekly illustrations for New Society magazine, book jackets and record sleeves for blues artists at Pye Records. It listed a drawing of the Johnnie Walker striding man among his known works, and said a New York Times art director had called him “the man who changed the look of British illustration”. That phrase became the title of a book about him, Brian Grimwood – the man who changed the look of British Illustration, which the Edinburgh blog listed as published by Black Dog Publishing in 2012.

The agency itself is the subject of a second book. The same Edinburgh post listed The Central Illustration Agency – Licence to Inspire, published by Pirum Press in 2010, as a source for the agency’s history and images.

Directors, books and a trip to New York.

The founder still sits on the board. The UK companies register lists Brian Grimwood as a director of the company since before November 1992, and Ben Cox as a director appointed on 26 January 2012. Cool Hunting, in an article by Gavin Lucas published on 15 May 2013, described Cox as the agency’s managing director.

That article recorded a deliberate move into the United States. Cool Hunting said that in the agency’s thirtieth year it was reaching out to American clients with a new US-focused website and two limited-edition screen prints. Cox told the magazine that the agency regularly worked with advertising agencies such as Wieden + Kennedy, JWT, M&C Saatchi and Ogilvy, and with editorial clients including New Scientist, The Telegraph and the Folio Society, but had not until then been proactive in seeking US commissions. He said the internet had already brought in work from across the States, and that geographical distance made little difference to American clients.

The prints carried the agency’s message in pictures. Cool Hunting said Cox sent teaser screen prints, designed by the London studio Telegramme, to a filtered list of New York art buyers, then followed up with phone calls; one print combined a British cup of tea with a steaming New York manhole. A second Telegramme print, issued as a numbered edition, showed a Manhattan cocktail decorated with an English umbrella instead of a cocktail umbrella. Artists named for the US push included Neal Fox, Brian Grimwood, Carol Lawson, Clare Melinsky, Ian Bilbey, Jessie Ford and Nishant Choksi.

The 2013 visit to Edinburgh showed a similar interest in work beyond the printed page. The college blog said Cox walked students through projects ranging from shop windows by Andrew Foster to book jackets and the transformation of spaces for a product launch, and described collaborations in which the agency’s artists produced newspapers together, as well as an illustration street party the agency had held.

A founder, a director, a London base.

Illustration agencies and type platforms sell other people’s work, so their own identity has a peculiar job: it has to stay in the background while still being recognisable. For an agency, the name is often the most important design decision. Some take a founder’s name, some a playful noun, some a plain description of what they do, and each choice sets a tone before a single portfolio image loads. The roster itself then becomes part of the brand. Which artists an agency represents, how their work is grouped and how evenly it is presented all say something about the house’s taste.

Type platforms face a similar problem with fonts. A marketplace or specimen site has to present many designers’ typefaces in a consistent frame, so the platform’s own wordmark, interface type and colour usually stay quiet. Specimen pages, sample sentences, filters and test-drive tools carry much of the character.

For both kinds of business, the website is the main brand surface. Navigation, image cropping, grid spacing and the tone of short biographies do the work that packaging does for a consumer product, and a redesign of the site is often the moment the identity visibly changes.

Covent Garden to Shoreditch.

The agency has moved east since its start. Design Education Talks said in August 2025 that the agency, founded in Covent Garden, was by then based in Shoreditch, and that it represented artists working in illustration, motion graphics, mural art, sculpture and CGI. The agency’s own website now groups its work under Illustration, Motion and Mural, and its about page describes the agency as curators, as ambassadors for the graphic arts producing public projects, and as advisers with a formal position in education.

In the 2025 article, Grimwood spoke about how the trade had changed. He said that an agent had become more necessary for illustrators, because connections had become largely digital and young illustrators found it hard to reach art directors, and that the agency had to say no a lot in order to keep itself fairly small. He also told the series that the agency looked for artists who could balance creativity with practicality.

Grimwood remains part of the agency’s public face as an artist as well as a founder. On 21 May 2025 the agency published an interview with him on its own news page, recorded at his studio in the East Sussex countryside. In it he described his working practice as a form of exercise and said boredom was what he feared; the agency recalled that he had studied under Owen Frampton alongside David Bowie and George Underwood, and that he went on to found Central Illustration along the way. The agency’s about page carries an image credited to Jonny Wan, one of the artists it represents.

For a design guide, Central Illustration Agency shows how an illustration agency can build its identity around a founder who is also one of its artists. Compare Handsome Frank and Jelly, two other illustration agencies in this collection. For this guide we use red, blue, cream and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Central Illustration Agency’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.