How To Stand Out By Using Hand-Drawn Web Design Elements

EDITOR’S NOTE: With nearly 2 billion websites out there nowadays, it’s more important than ever to stand out with your website design. Utilizing hand-drawn elements or graphics in your website design is an excellent way to express individuality in a cluttered digital environment and convey humanity. Adding in this humanistic touch can make your website more inviting and memorable. Some tips to keep in mind when designing hand-drawn elements for your website are to mix and match them with other types of visual elements on your website such as animations and other typography. This way you can accomplish the goal of adding more unique elements without creating chaos or confusion. Also, be playful with it! Use hand-drawn elements to create a fun and humanistic tone to your website. If you have any questions about your website design or want us to handle it for you, reach out to us at Prebuilt Sites or The BBS Agency. We’d love to help you out!

What stands out as an incredible web design project for you? Do you count your creation as a success if it’s modern, minimal, and accessible? Maybe you’re the kind of designer that’s constantly experimenting with the latest dynamic design tools or state-of-the-art technology. Perhaps your websites are vivid, animated, and brimming with unique components?

Sometimes, creating the ideal design means thinking carefully about what you want to accomplish for your client. The purpose of your web creation has a significant impact on the components that you need to consider. For instance, if you’re hoping for a highly emotive and human design, it may be worth combining some of your sleek lines and graphics with hand-drawn elements.

The Value of Hand-Drawn Graphics in Web Design

Hand-drawn elements are just like the other components of web design; that way may use to express individuality in a cluttered digital environment. In a world where everyone focuses on futuristic and virtual creations, hand-drawn elements can pull attention back to the importance of humanity in your content.

As web designers, we know that visual components often impact people more than text-based content. Illustrations are highly engaging functional elements that capture audience attention and convey relevant information.

The main difference between hand-drawn elements and graphics built with vectors and other digital components is that one appears to be more influenced by the human hand than the other. Even if your illustrations are created on a screen, just like any other web design component, it pushes an audience to see something more straightforward, more natural, and authentic.

For a brand trying to convey innocence and humanity in its personality, hand-drawn design can speak to the part of the human psyche that’s often unappreciated by web design. Perhaps more than any other visual, the content reminds your audience that there’s a human behind the web page.

The Value of Hand-Drawn Features in Web Design

Any image can have a massive impact on the quality of your web design. Visuals deliver complex information in an easy-to-absorb format. In today’s world of fast-paced browsing, where distractions are everywhere, visuals are a method of capturing attention and delivering value fast.

However, with hand-drawn elements, you go beyond the basic functionality of images to embrace the emotional side of the content. Benefits include:

A memorable experience: Web illustrations are becoming more popular among leading brands like Innocent Smoothies and Dropbox. However, the time that goes into these components means that they’re still scarce. If you want to stand out online, illustrations can help you do that.
Brand personality: One of the most significant benefits of hand-drawn web design is showcasing your brand personality. The blocky lines of imperfect content that go into illustrated images highlight the human nature of your company. So many businesses are keen to look “perfect” today to make the human touch much more inviting.
Differentiation: As mentioned above, hand illustrations are still rare in the digital design landscape. If you’re struggling to find a way to make your brand stand out, this could be it. Although there needs to be meaning behind your design, the result could be a more unique brand if you can convey that meaning properly.

Tips for Using Hand Drawn Elements in Web Design

Hand-drawn components, just like any other element of visual web design, demand careful strategy. You don’t want to overwhelm your websites with these sketches, or you could end up damaging the user experience in the process.

As you work on your web designs, pulling hand-drawn elements into the mix, think about how you can use every illustration to accomplish a crucial goal. For instance:

CREATE SEPARATION

Hand-drawn design components can mix and match with other visual elements on your website. They work perfectly alongside videos and photos and help to highlight critical points.

On the Lunchbox website, the company uses hand-drawn elements. This helps make the site stand out, and it provides additional context for customers scanning the website for crucial details.

ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE

Sometimes, hand-drawn elements are all about connecting with end-users on a deeper, more emotional level. One of the best ways to do this is to make your hand-drawn elements fun and interactive pieces in the design landscape.

One excellent example of this is in the Stained Glass music video here. This interactive game combines an exciting web design trend with creative interactive components so that users can transform the web experience into something unique to them.

HIGHLIGHT HEADERS WITH TYPOGRAPHY

Sometimes, the best hand-drawn elements aren’t full illustrations or images. Hand-drawn or doodle-like typography can also give depth to a brand image and website design.

Typography styles that mimic natural, genuine handwriting are excellent for capturing the audience’s attention. These captivating components remind the customer of the human being behind the brand while not detracting from the elegance of the website.

This example of hand-drawn typography from the Tradewinds hotel shows how designers can use script fonts to immediately capture customer attention. Notice that the font is still easy to read from a distance, so it’s not reducing clarity.

SET THE MOOD

Depending on the company that you’re designing for, your website creation choices can have a massive impact on the emotional resonance that the brand has with its audience. Hand-drawn elements allow websites to often take on a more playful tone. They can give any project a touch of innocence and friendliness that’s hard to accomplish elsewhere.

A child-like aesthetic with bright colors and bulky fonts combines with hand-drawn elements on the Le Puzz website. This is an excellent example of how web designers can use hand-drawn elements to convey a mood of creativity and fun.

ANIMATED ELEMENTS

Finally, if you want to combine the unique nuances of hand-drawn design with the modern components of what’s possible in the digital world today, why not add some animation. Animated elements combined with illustrations can help to bring a website to life.

In the Kinetic.com website, the animated illustrated components help to highlight the punk-rock nature of the fanzine. It’s essential to ensure that you don’t go too over-the-top with your animations here. Remember that too many animations can quickly slow down a website and harm user-friendliness.

Finishing Thoughts on Hand-Drawn Elements

Hand-drawn elements have a lot to offer to the web-design world.

Even if you’re not the best artist yourself, you can still simulate hand-drawn components in your web design by using the right tools and capabilities online.

Although these features won’t fit well into every environment, they can be perfect for businesses that want to show their human side in today’s highly digitized world. Hand-drawn components, perhaps more than any other web design feature, showcase the innocence and creativity of the artists that often exist behind portfolio pages and startup brands.

Could you experiment with hand-drawn design in your next project?

Originally posted on Web Designer Depot.