Illustrating our 'RELX in the UK' story

How do you illustrate a British corporate success story while avoiding the cliches?

At RELX, we publish nearly 50 long form stories a year about enabling our customers, employees and the communities we serve make better decisions. We try to make each story as visually engaging as possible and think carefully about our headlines and cover image.

Most recently, we produced a story about RELX in the UK.

RELX isn't a household name. As a business that provides analytics to professionals in specific market segments, we tend to fly under the radar.

However, over the past decade, RELX has outperformed every FTSE100 stock, and the market capitalisation is now about £50bn making us the UK’s 11^th largest company.

RELX is arguably one of Britain's biggest tech companies and one of the country's biggest success story.

We operate at the forefront of developments in analytics and AI technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing and more recently generative AI, helping customers address some of society's most complex challenges: a retailer or a bank deciding whether an online transaction is genuine, a doctor finding the best way to treat a patient or a litigator assessing whether to take a case to court.

When Bank of America, an American investment bank, produced a list of businesses “most likely to benefit from generative AI”, RELX was the only UK company to appear in the top 10.

As the Financial Times' Lex recently put it, "it's the quiet ones you gotta watch."

So how do you capture all of these themes in one cover image?

it's art and science

On the surface, this is a story about the UK, so initially we tried some options along that route: things that would immediately be recognisable to people around the world as representing the UK - Union flags, London skylines, red buses...

But more than just being about the UK, this is really a story about success. So we moved away from the basic UK theme and tried out some ideas with a gold wreath.

The approach didn't grab us and and none of the test images captured the themes of innovation and technology.

Enter AI

The hot topic on everyone's lips right now is generative AI. As a business we know that better than most as we've been using AI for a decade and recently announced the launch of products that use generative AI. But our communications had never used it to generate images. The technology is fairly new and we needed to experiment. And so began a crash course in generating images using AI.

We're looking for an AI-generated image that conveys technology, success and the UK. But where do we start?

It soon became apparent that the challenge with AI was going to find the right key words to help the tool generate something appropriate. After a few early failures, it became clear that it works best when prompts are very specific and tangible. Broad concepts like “A dramatic image showing a successful UK technology business” don’t work, but specific things like “A horse riding through the English countryside at sunset” do.

Basically, we found that if we can’t scribble the image that we want on a bit of paper, then AI won’t be able to do anything useful with it either. It doesn’t have the ability to imagine things for itself.

Initially we tried terms like “An AI powered data network that contributes to the rule of law, health equity and financial inclusion“. The AI came back with images which, while quite impressive, we felt were boring and looked too generic.

The problem is that the AI doesn’t really know what rule of law, health equity or financial inclusion look like. They’re all concepts rather than actual physical things.

We also know that when illustrating stories, images of people tend to work best. We came up with a few pictures of people, but felt when using generative AI, people tend to look a bit weird. We decided to avoid.

This led us to focus on some real tangible objects, eventually settling on an oak tree - a traditional British symbol of growth and strength. We then used prompt engineering to improve the image and gave the AI more specific instructions:

- "Please add a sprinkling of red, white and blue colours in the style of the union flag."

- "Now please add some connected nodes to represent technology."

(For some reason, giving instructions without the please didn't feel quite right.)

We loved the round tree above. The only problem was that it's bare branches didn't exactly shout out 'thriving'.

We headed back to the AI and asked it to generated some green leaves and combined them in Photoshop. While we were at it, we also introduced the UK flag and connected a few of the dots, to leave us with the final image below.

Our head of communications posted the story on his LinkedIn feed and in just a week generated the highest number of impressions of any article he has ever shared.

RELX in the UK