How to Create Your Own Illustrations

Importance of creating custom illustration

Using illustration is also a great way to attract the audience’s attention to your content. Especially in the online world, everything moves fast, and brands need visual stimulation to catch the target market’s attention and be the preferred brand to purchase. Illustration communicates complex messages quickly and more easily than text alone. Internet users rely on images to help them understand websites quickly so they can navigate efficiently. 

What is a web illustration?

The added element of customizing an illustration work gives you branding power. You'll have something unique that will help build your company's identity and voice through artwork. By creating your own illustration design, you will have complete control over how your illustration looks, and there is no need to pay extra for revisions or wait weeks just to apply small changes and revisions.

If you lack in-house artistic skills and you don't have enough funds to hire professional artists, then using custom illustrations is the best option you have available. All you have to do is learn the basics by reading some illustration design tips, and by knowing the best illustration tools for you. There are a lot of illustration websites out there, and all you need to do is check them out and decide which one you like best. 

In this article, we will give you some illustration design tips on how to create high-quality custom illustrations. The goal is for these web illustrations to make your brand be more attractive to visitors and convert all of those visits to sales. 

Custom Web Illustration Design Tips To Follow

 1. Be clear on your goals

You must have something to aim at so that everything you will incorporate in your web illustration is directed to what you want to achieve. Prior to designing your custom illustration, you should already know what you really want to communicate to your audience. By defining your goals and direction, you will be able to commit to what you are doing, and you will be able to track your progress. You should know your brand objective, target market, and key message for you to create your illustration that will speak for your brand. You will know you are making progress because it is clear where you are headed and how you will bring your brand there. After all, it is only you who has complete control of the direction of your brand.

 2. Be consistent

After knowing what you really want to communicate and what image you want to portray, you must stick to it. If you are still building your brand and image, you want your custom illustration to be consistent with the overall look and feel of your website or custom illustration design. By being consistent you will be able to build your brand identity that people will remember. The identity and branding that you will keep will be ingrained in the minds of your target market. Just keep showing them the same logo or brand color or communication until such time that they will know it is your brand by just seeing the logo shape or palette. Changing your communication and branding often will make you look like you are not decided on what you really want your brand to be.

Take the iconic brand Nike as an example. It carries its logo and communication from then until now, giving the brand so much history behind it. The check or swoosh mark is and will always be associated with the brand simply because Nike is consistent. You should do exactly the same for your brand if you want to be as established as Nike. 

3. Leverage templates and icons

In doing custom illustrations for your brands, it’s important to choose the right colors, fonts, and icons so that all of them will blend together nicely. However, not all people are creative enough to know how to make the elements work together to produce a beautiful and remarkable illustration. This is where you can use the templates and icons that are already available online. Thanks to technology, there’s no need to make custom shapes and designs from scratch. You can always choose from user-contributed icons, templates, stock photos, and videos. There are unlimited selections out there, and you just need to pick which ones you like. 

4. Master the basics

When it comes to illustrating, everyone has a style and technique that works best for them.  Custom illustration might seem difficult at first, but if you are diligent in practicing and you know the basics, it can be mastered. Mastering the basics of illustration design is the best way to ensure success when creating custom illustrations for your brand. Before you learn advanced editing, you must know the basics and fundamentals. No matter how skilled you become in terms of illustration designing, you will always go back to basics. Here are some of them:

1. Shapes - This will allow you to quickly put common forms like rectangles, squares, circles, and others. They’re hard to make if you are going to do it yourself.

2. Rulers – Through this, you can snap, mirror, or create perspective by just aligning the edges and drawing it to a specific point.‍

3. Pen Tool – For your curves, shapes manipulation, vertices editing needs, this is your best friend. ‍

4. Guides – If you want to create separation between objects have the correct amount of space on the edges, guides will make it easier for you to set up objects in the right place.

5. Choose the best custom design site/app

Knowing the image and design that you want for your brand is one thing, and choosing the custom design tool to use is another. With lots of options that are available on the web, you might find it hard to decide on the tool that you will use. By choosing the custom design site or app to use, you can just simply use or customize existing materials, and pay the minimum license fee, then you are good to go. Who needs to create it from scratch if you can just adjust or personalize an existing illustration.  

As previously mentioned, there are a lot of choices available online. In the next part of the article, we will share with you one of the best custom design sites that we found online. Read on because this site might be the right fit for you. 

Using DesignStripe to Create Illustrations

It is an online illustration creator where users can customize existing templates and layouts. It has a library of customizable illustrations, and you can tweak some parts and the existing designs. It offers both free and paid options for users.  

DesignStripe is very easy to use, and it will allow you to put colors, add figures and details, change sizes, and export images into your desired format, be it JPG or PNG. It also supports SVG format, but you need to avail the paid version that you can renew every month. 

The site has all the predefined and predesigned styles, so it is recommended for those who have no time and enough skills to create illustrations from scratch. It is also very easy to explore and find relevant illustrations for your designs with the help of categories. You can browse or select illustrations for different categories and fields like sports, food, arts, nature, pets, among others. 

As it is easy to use, it is perfect regardless of the user’s design skills and experience. The creators wanted the illustration site to be friendly to everyone, so DesignStripe has easy customization tools and has a library of graphic files and illustrations with different variations. It also features a smart color palette to make color mixing easier for the user.

If you are hearing about DesignStripe just now and don’t know how it works, let us share with you some guides on how to use it. We suggest that you open their site as you go along with the guide so you can see it visually. 

Step-by-Step Guide on How to Use DesignStripe

1. Create a free account and start using DesignStripe right away. 

You can sign up by providing your email address and password, or you can simply sign up using your Google account. After logging in, you will be directed to the main page, where you will see the categories and some trending illustrations.

2. Expand the categories if you are looking for a specific design related to your category. 

There is an option to sort the categories by default or display the latest design first You may also select from their two types of illustrations: scenes and objects.

3. After selecting your preferred illustration, it will open the editor page. 

On that page, simply put, you can edit anything in the existing design. The color palette can be changed manually or just click “suggest a new palette”, and DesignStripe will be the one to mix and match colors for you. You can also save your palettes, so you don’t need to re-do it the next time you need to create an illustration with your brand colors.

There is also a feature where you can adjust the scene and details of the illustration. If you want a minimalist and uncluttered design, just swipe to the left, but for more details to your custom illustration, swipe right.

To adjust the look and feel of your illustration, it’s the same as how you customize your design’s scene and details. You just need to swipe the slider to the left for linear design and right for the outlined design. You can also do advanced editing so you can change the objects in the design and toggle their invisibility to see the changes. 

What’s good with the editor page of DesignStripe is that you can view the changes in your design live so you can decide if your illustration looks good to you already or if it needs more editing.

4. Once you are satisfied with your illustration, you can already export your design. 

Just click the download button, then choose the resolution and final export format. It can be PNG and JPG if you are using the free version and add SVG format if you avail of the premium plan.  

DesignStripe’s library is huge, and you can find a lot of free illustrations that you can customize and export. If you want more premium designs and you want full access to all of the illustrations, you just need to avail yourself of their premium plan, which costs S20 USD per person per month. 

Indeed, DesignStripe allows users to create unique and custom illustrations in just a few clicks and slides. The site can provide custom illustrations and vectors to make your designs unique. For whatever project you are doing, be it banner ads, business cards, social media posts, or websites,  DesignStripe got you covered. It is friendly to all users – both experienced and not.  

If you want to level up your design gaming even if you have limited skills, we suggest you try DesignStripe. With its help, you can create beautiful design illustrations in no time. 

Takeaway

Creating and using custom illustrations help you build visual branding that allows your target market to get to know your brand. It is your way to get the attention of your audience and establish connection and trust. Your custom illustrations can also help you deliver your brand message, share your feelings, and stand out versus your competitors. 

The custom illustration makes complicated processes and services easier to understand, boosting custom conversions by helping people easily find what they are looking for. If you do it right, custom illustration can be far more effective than text alone at representing custom ideas and concepts.