Here we are, once again, at a content marketer’s favorite time of year: The end of it! It’s a wonderful time that allows us to reflect, look ahead, and create surprisingly compelling listicles about things like “Our Best Posts of The Year” (as well as being mentioned in other people’s Best Posts of The Year).

In short: We love it. And we hope you do too.

And, as we often do on holidays like this, we have a new illustration of PPC Hero to show off. Some of you will remember that we gave you a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how we create these cute illustrations in our post about this year’s PPC Hero holiday cards, and we figured this would be another good time to talk about the creative process behind these illustrations.

We come up with a very rough concept (PPC Hero celebrates New Year’s Eve, for example), and communicate the idea to our friends at Andy Toonz Studios. Then their master illustrators take the idea and run with it, creating a (again rough) draft as a simple sketch for us to review.

Of course, being creative-types, we go through a few rounds of revisions and back-and-forths before we come up with the finished product you’re used to seeing on this site. And we’re particularly proud of this Happy New Year’s illustration, so we included images of the drafts as well, so you can see the process from start to finish:

new-year

Hope you enjoy it! And now, on to the bonus content: New Year’s means it’s time again to set your goals for an exciting year ahead. Make accomplishing your PPC new year’s resolution a cinch with these great posts from the experts at PPC Hero: