Where to get stock "hand-drawn" style illustrations for a website?

January 10, 2018 9:08 AM

Recently, I came across a really impressive website. (URL below). What techniques did the designers use here for their illustrations?

Are these stock or custom illustrations?

Secondly, is there a plugin or application (with Adobe Illustrator, Corel etc,) which takes a vector image and turns it into a "hand-drawn" style image?

https://www.lemonade.com/

posted by jacobean to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

I'm confused. Those don't look hand drawn at all to me, they look like vector art.

I say that because there's no minor wiggles in the lines, no variation in line thickness, the shading is all one single tone and has sharp/clean borders, there is heavy use of rounded rectangles, sharp rectangles, straight lines and other stock shapes that come in vector programs, etc. Also there's a lot of mirrored objects. About the only thing that makes it look a little more organic is the line breaks, but those are just artistically inserted (e.g. right curtain is mirror of left, but with a break), so maybe that's what you're picking up on?

I suppose they may be stock vectors (compare e.g. here, or here), and certainly if you wanted to hunt through that source or other similar, you could get something pretty close to your example page illustrations.

It is conceptually possible to take a _bitmap_ image and trace it to vector, then tweak it by hand to get decent results (like so), but that won't look like your examples, it will look more stencil-y. In this case I think it would be faster and better to just make the art directly in Illustrator/Inkscape, possibly starting from stock vectors.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:27 AM on January 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

Its just vector art, probably created in illustrator and exported. Take screenshots of the site and any decent designer should be able to easily match the style for you.
posted by Chrischris at 10:09 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The term you are looking for is 'vector line-art'. These images are drawn in a computer, most likely in Illustrator. They are not scans of something drawn by hand. They don't even give the appearance of hand-drawn.

Compare line art with hand drawn. As SaltySalticid says, hand drawn suggest irregularities that you're not seeing on the lemonade site.

Whether they were bought from a stock site, or custom drawn is irrelevant. Depending on your abilities, you may be able to draw these. If not, then you'd buy what someone else drew.

In general, it's much easier to draw these from scratch than to convert a photo to vectors.

If you already have a vector that is more complicated, you just need to strip away pieces of it until you're left with line art.
posted by hydra77 at 10:11 AM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Flaticon has tons of these types of graphics. That site is cute!
posted by i_mean_come_on_now at 11:24 AM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

You can probably buy a bundle of illustrations like that at DesignCuts or CreativeMarket.
posted by sarajane at 3:39 PM on January 10, 2018