How to enhance your brand with custom illustrations
People like images more than text. That is why we give particular emphasis to custom illustrations to build brand awareness and strategies.
People like images more than text. That is why we give particular emphasis to custom illustrations to build brand awareness and strategies.
Custom illustration design is a complex activity that you can use for different purposes. It is a perfect blend of art and branding, ensuring maximum visibility for various platforms, especially social media.
Over the years, custom illustrations have become one of the crucial factors that enhance the visual appearance of brands. More and more brands use custom illustration tools to express their brand's promise and unique selling proposition. Unsurprisingly, custom illustration tools have become so popular among company owners.
Why is customer illustration important for your brand?
Custom illustrations are designed to be shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, based on the target audience's needs. As a brand owner, illustration designs contribute to making your brand remembered by your potential customers, which can boost ROI in the long run.
Moreover, custom illustration designs bring you closer to your customers through their imagination and creativity, as they allow them to express their feelings about a brand or product. This way, both parties become emotionally attached, leading them into a customer-brand relationship that eventually benefits the company.
If you are a brand owner and you're still wondering if custom illustrations will help you enhance your brands, read on as we share how these illustration designs can benefit your brand.
Why should you consider using illustrations for your brand?
1. Give your brand its own identity
Custom illustrations are so powerful for their uniqueness because of the messages, feelings, and emotions they convey for your brand. These illustration designs are essential in establishing your identity. They make you connect to your target market deeper because these illustrations often tell stories behind your brand. In return, being connected to your audience will make them trust your brand even more.
While it can be helpful to look at other brands for inspiration, you should communicate why your brand is different from those that have the same industry as you. By having your own identity, your audience will recognize it as soon as they see the illustrations that may remind them of your brand.
Whether in social media posts, custom illustrations for your website, apps, or editorial publication, it is essential that your custom design should be consistent every time you post on multiple platforms. You should also always convey what your brand stands for.
2. Communicate Better and Easier
Now more than ever, communication is a crucial aspect of our lives. This applies to businesses, too. Many business owners struggle with communicating what they mean, and there's always a risk of being misunderstood by the target audience.
This is where illustrations can help. Communicating something using visuals is much easier to understand than reading the texts. People love images that they can know at a glance. The illustration designs also evoke more emotions than simple text, so when you use them, you will be creating a bond with your target audience instead of just informing them.
3. Improve your Content
Illustrations can help elevate your content and grab your target audience's attention. Rather than just plain text, having images and design illustrations on your website or social media posts can potentially make your audience stay or look at them longer.
You can make your post more interactive and dynamic by including those illustrations. Just make sure that the custom designs complement the text because, according to studies, content with relevant images gets 94% more views versus those that don't have.
Having text with images can help you lessen the risk of boring your audience. You wouldn't want them to look into other brands' posts because they find your content boring, right?
4. Grab Your Audience’s Attention
Let's face it - when dealing with social media channels, it's tough to reach users and grab their attention for a long time. This is because when they scroll through Facebook or Instagram, they are bombarded with a lot of information, news, and images, and sometimes they scroll up and down without even paying attention to what they see.
Your custom illustrations, when done correctly, can help you catch the user's attention, even if they already saw a lot from their endless scrolling. Research shows that content with images receives 650% more engagement than those posted with pure text only.
If you show up on your audience's feed with a great illustration that delivers your brand message and vision, then it is very likely that you're going to grab attention and interest.
To capture a more extensive audience successfully, you need to deliver great and unique illustrations that will stay in their memories long enough so they would consider buying your brand instead of your competitor's.
5. Efficient Communication of Ideas
Social media is a place where we discover new things and people. This is why all your efforts in becoming visible on social media should be directed towards communicating ideas in the most efficient way possible.
With creativity, you can come up with such great custom graphics to convey your message systematically. Doing it for the first time might be challenging, and you might encounter some learning curves. Still, once you get familiar with how it is done, your custom illustrations will help you hit it big on social media while spending your free time doing other things related to your brand building.
Effective ways to use illustration designs for your brand
Most brands now use illustrations to create a lasting impression on their audience. These custom graphics are used in various forms to express their brand's personality and convey messages that they can't put into words. A well-designed illustration can help you make your point better than text could do alone.
So how exactly can you maximize the use of these illustration designs? Here are some practical ways to use them in your brand-building process.
Creating a hero image for your website or social media posts
It is important to capture the interest of the audience as soon as they land on your website or social media site. A high-quality illustration or photo that serves as the anchor image can help you do that. It creates a visual hierarchy in your website and social media content and guides your users around it.
Image for blog articles
Probably all of us would agree that illustrations add character and color to an article. They enhance the visual value of the blog posts and can also help clarify information for content that is difficult to understand.
Using an illustration that complements the content of your blog posts allows the readers to imagine what you're talking about. This will help them remember what they read better because visuals trigger memory retention. So next time you post a blog article, try adding custom illustrations to make it more interesting.
Email newsletters
An average person gets 53 emails every day. That's a lot of information to absorb, especially when the email contains lengthy text. One way to lessen their difficulty in understanding the content of your brand's newsletter is through illustrations that can deliver the message in the shortest time possible.
The more playful and custom the illustrations are, the better. Your newsletter can influence how the customer engages with the email, leading them to discover more about your brand's promotions at the moment, hence the chances of increasing your sales.
Ad banners and posters
The most common online ads are banner ads. These banner ads use images to amplify the message that you deliver to your audience. To make sure your banners get clicked on, you need to make sure that they have interesting and custom illustrations to stand out from the rest.
Make sure that the illustrations you will use are entirely related to the central message of your banner ads and posters. Your audience will know if the design of your banner ad is well thought of just by looking at your image selections.
Product packaging
As much as promoting your product is essential, your product packaging is also vital for your brand's success. Designing your packaging can indeed be overwhelming because there are so many choices to make, and even the tiniest decisions can have a tremendous impact on your company's identity.
Using graphics in your product packaging design can make a difference for you. These custom illustrations are highly recommended because they portray your brand message much better than words. Although this may take up a lot of space in your label, it pays off big time when people start associating your brand with visuals rather than text.
Now that you know how you can leverage on custom designs, maybe you're wondering if there are illustration tools that you can use as a starter. To answer your question, yes, there are illustration builders out there. Hint: there are a lot of them.
Six illustration builders to use for your business
1. DesignStripe
DesignStripe allows users to create beautiful illustrations even with limited design skills. It provides simple and powerful customization tools that are fun to use. Using DesignStripe gives the designer the freedom to play around with the design because it features limitless color combinations and palettes. Moreover, you will get fresh illustrations because they add new designs constantly.
For those who are interested in trying it, they offer a free plan with some restrictions. If you want to enjoy the full features of DesignStripe, their subscription fee is $20 per month per individual. Also, they will launch a plan for teams very soon, which is perfect for companies that need multi-user access.
2. IRA Design
Developed by Creative Tim, Ira Design is a free and open source custom illustration tool that helps designers and business owners build amazing illustrations, gradients, and hand-drawn sketches.
Ira Design comes with a great variety of ready-to-use characters, objects, and backgrounds and has five gradient colors that you can mix. What's good about this illustration building tool is that you may download your designs in SVG, AI or PNG formats.
3. DrawKit
DrawKit is an excellent resource for designers and business owners looking to create new projects with fewer designing skills available. It provides access to more than 50 free illustrations in two different styles, and it has some additional premium packs available.
Files can be downloaded as fully editable SVG or PNG files, and there are lots of categories to choose from. In addition, DrawKit grants you a non-exclusive and non-transferable royalty-free, worldwide license to download, copy, modify, and use icons and illustrations for your purposes. You may also use DrawKit’s illustrations on your own website or within other digital products without time limits.
4. ManyPixels
ManyPixels is an on-demand creative service that has been providing thousands of businesses around the globe with quality, fast, and affordable custom illustrations since its founding in the year 2018.
It helps businesses of all sizes and industries to scale up their creative content production. ManyPixels can help you create custom illustrations in less time so you can focus your efforts on more important things that will make your business grow.
If you want to scale up your content production and manage all your illustration designs and images in one place, you should give ManyPixels a try.
5. Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer provides a sleek interface that allows you to accomplish more in less time. This is perfect for beginners because of its uncluttered and clean interface that is also easy and fun to use.
It features a full set of illustration design tools, making designing graphics intuitive and fun for beginners and advanced users. Gravit Designer has a lot of vector editing tools, artboards with multiple layers per document, a color picker tool, and support for multi-page PDF files.
It is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems, and you can use the software on whatever platform you choose. You may choose to use the Free Plan with some restrictions on the features, but you can also opt to avail of their Pro Plan ($49.99/year) if you want to enjoy the full benefits of Gravit Designer.
Takeaway
Custom Illustrations can help you capture, inspire and motivate your audience because they are more personal than just texts alone. They have the power to create a deeper connection with your audience and can also help you stand out from your competitors.
Regardless of whether you're a startup entrepreneur or you're already established in your chosen field, you can create your promotional materials to build a stronger image for your brand.
Just explore and embrace the challenges you will be meeting as you learn how to make those custom illustrations. After all, you have a lot of tools to choose from, and you need to decide which one is perfect for you.
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