Tyrus

A free digital toolkit from Airbnb Design that helps freelance illustrators optimize their business, so they have more time to focus on what they love.

Tyrus is here to help

Working for yourself, you may have realized that creating beautiful illustrations is only half the job. The other half is managing the business side of things, which requires an entirely different set of skills.

We surveyed over 250 illustrators around the world to find out their pain points, which ranged from dealing with tricky feedback to managing client expectations. With Tyrus, we unpacked those challenges to create guides, templates, and tools so you can focus less on client management and more on creating your best work.

Sharing what we’ve learned

Illustration is a defining element of Airbnb’s brand identity. Over the years, we’ve made it a priority to partner with hundreds of illustrators from nearly every continent. During that time, we’ve learned a lot about challenges our colleagues face when working with clients.

In an effort to help (and to become better clients ourselves), we made it our mission to design a thoughtful way to address these pain points directly. With the help of a survey of over 250 illustrators worldwide, Tyrus was born.

Here’s how it works

Tyrus empowers you to create more successful client relationships by diving deep into four key stages of the collaborative process.

What you'll learn

01 Nail the Brief 02 Champion Originality 03 Outwit Deadlines 04 Demystify Feedback

• Warm Up
  A brief introduction that identifies challenges and previews solutions
• Deep Dive
  A focused exploration of real-life client scenarios
• Downloadable Templates
  To help you put what you’ve learned into practice

• Curious about one topic but not another? You can use Tyrus sequentially, or focus on one or two areas à la carte. The path you take is entirely up to you.