A distinctive visual presence is vital to your brand. It creates recognizability, expresses your values, and invites your target audience to explore your offerings. However, your visual identity goes beyond your logo or simple graphics. More businesses are embracing the art of illustration to communicate their message. Read on to discover amazing and brilliant custom illustrations that brands have used on their websites, marketing materials, and apps.
What Are Custom Illustrations?
A custom illustration is a thematic or informational visual work that typically features characters, landscapes, or objects. Unlike logos, which are more symbolic, or standard graphics, custom illustrations tell a story, share information, or highlight your brand's values. Examples include infographics, menus or signage, or cover images for print materials or digital platforms.
Business websites often use custom illustrations to create a better page flow or highlight products and services. Some even animate those illustrations. We are also seeing a rise in animated explainer videos that can play a huge role in content marketing campaigns.
Many brands, especially mobile apps, have made custom illustration the basis of their offering. Beautiful, immersive illustrations are the heart of apps such as Headspace (a meditation app) and Fabulous (a productivity app).
Custom illustrations give your brand a unique visual identity. Depending on your aesthetic, you could be fun and whimsical, lush and inspiring, sleek and innovative, and so on. Let's look at some excellent examples of custom illustrations and how they elevate their respective brands.
Prepaid wireless provider Mint Mobile is known for its unique business model and affordable plans. To express its innovative approach, the brand creates custom illustrations featuring its mascot, the Mint Fox, and several other animal friends. These characters appear in various scenes, from a relaxing spa to the Super Bowl. These illustrations appear throughout the brand's website, blog headers, email campaigns, and app.
The whimsical aesthetic complements the brand's fresh, funny voice and the influence of owner Ryan Reynolds. The Mint Fox is an engaging and adaptable character that gives Mint Mobile an instantly recognizable brand presence.
(Source for all Mint Mobile images)
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Yet another brand that makes great use of a fun animal mascot, Mailchimp is a leading email marketing provider. Their chimp character composes their logo and appears throughout their website. Also, their landing pages and social media headers feature quirky custom illustrations.
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Designed to look like quick sketches of diverse scenes, this aesthetic symbolizes the human connections that Mailchimp helps brands make with their audiences.
Flocksy is a provider of unlimited graphic design services, and has many creatives who can design stunning custom illustrated graphics. They also offer video and copywriting services and video editing services. Their own page reflects an illustrative style that is fun and modern. Here is an example of their own style.
And a couple of examples of designs their creatives have made for clients.
As one of the first food-delivery services, Blue Apron needed to concisely explain its unique offerings. Custom illustrations were the perfect solution. Using a hand drawn aesthetic that symbolized their homegrown approach, the brand created illustrated explainer pages and videos.
The illustrations are simple and engaging, and of course, they make good use of blue hues and complementary colors.
(All images sourced from Blue Apron.)
This innovative habit app is famous for its immersive, vivid illustrations. Featuring a gentle character moving throughout lush landscapes, Fabulous invites users to practice mindfulness and craft their best lives. The sweeping shapes, unusual colors, and soft gradients are dreamlike and inviting.
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In addition to the meditative animations on the app, the Fabulous website features full page custom illustrations to entice new visitors. Soothing!
Not to be confused with the Vampire Slayer, Buffy is a bedding brand that promises "Earth's comfiest comforters." While they do use photographs as well, custom illustrations pop up throughout their website.
They feature simple line drawings with a soft, bubbly aesthetic that perfectly symbolizes their offerings. Many of the illustrations are animated, adding a dynamic quality to their visual presence.
(All images sourced from Buffy.)
As Adobe Creative Cloud (formerly Adobe Creative Suite) offers a bevy of design tools, it's only appropriate that they use gorgeous illustrations. Each new release of an Adobe app features a new artwork on its loading screen, inspiring users to design their own masterpieces. The Adobe blog headers also feature custom illustrations. While these visual pieces are produced by different illustrators, they share a lush, vivid aesthetic that symbolizes Adobe's sophistication and creative power.
Craft breweries tend to embrace quirky, distinctive visual branding to express their artisan style. Lighthouse Brewing epitomizes this trend, featuring beautiful custom illustrations throughout their digital presence.
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To match their nautical theme, Lighthouse Brewing depicts sea creatures, watercraft, and epic oceanscapes in gorgeous cover images. These illustrations make customers want to sing a sea shanty and sip some ale, and we can't blame them.
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Who doesn't want a narwhal or unicorn flying by after they complete a task? That's one of the many whimsical features of Asana, a project management platform known for its beautiful aesthetic. Custom illustrations appear throughout the app, offering visual guidance and a relaxing vibe that certainly helps on a stressful workday.
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Asana's aesthetic is colorful, smooth, and inspirational. Dynamic lines, vivid hues, and geometric shapes evoke creative energy and perfect productivity vibes.
Intercom is a customer service messenger app for online businesses. To express its intuitive, friendly design, Intercom combines doodles, dynamic shapes, and simple icons in custom illustrations. These appear as headers, tile images, and navigational elements.
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On its blog, Intercom features lush, highly detailed artwork that brings a sophisticated yet accessible vibe to its visual identity.
This intuitive personal wiki and project management platform promises to be your singular workspace. Its black and white aesthetic and cartoon style give it a fresh, friendly vibe that matches the brand's promise of easier collaboration.
Notion's custom illustrations depict both dynamic scenes and simple icons. It's clean, tidy, and compelling.
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Most pet food brands use shiny animal photographs on their product packaging. Tiny Tigers, a premium cat food brand, takes a different approach. Their cans and boxes feature various custom illustrations depicting cats performing circus acts.
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A simple hand drawn aesthetic, combined with fun scenes of adorable kitties, makes Tiny Tigers stand out from its many competitors.
This Markdown notes app for Mac and iOS promises a simple, uncluttered way to draft and organize notes. To reflect this streamlined approach, it uses beautiful, adorable line drawings of its polar bear mascot. The bear appears throughout the website to illustrate key concepts.
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On their blog, the bear enjoys full color scenes to demonstrate Bear's various use cases.
Slack has its own subculture and is much beloved across industries. That's largely due to its innovative, sleek aesthetic, expressed through stylized scenes and dynamic icons. Its custom illustrations feature hand drawn details, excellent use of shading, and subtly geometric shapes.
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The result is a sophisticated yet fresh vibe that symbolizes the brand's intuitive product and its focus on teamwork.
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The meditation and sleep app works by creating a beautiful audiovisual experience. With friendly characters in dreamy scenes, Headspace's aesthetic leverages both vibrant colors and soothing hues, depending on the feature. The smart use of simple gradients and stylized shapes makes them immersive yet not overwhelming.
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The custom illustrations not only appear throughout the app but also on the brand's website, blog, and social media.
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CRM software doesn't have to be boring, according to Salesforce. Their vibrant custom illustrations combine digital avatar characters with gorgeous backgrounds.
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When they do need to use actual photography, they seamlessly blend them into the illustrations. This could be hard to pull off, but it works, thanks to the good use of color and circle graphics to make the visuals pop.
Learning a new language can be intimidating. Duolingo makes excellent use of custom illustrations to create a welcoming, friendly vibe. From its adorable owl mascot to visual cues in the app itself, Duolingo proves the power of visual communication. That's especially important when users are trying to focus on strange words!
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An ecommerce platform that focuses on handmade items should have a visual identity to match. That's exactly the case for Etsy, which features eclectic custom illustrations across its digital presence.
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The unique combination of flat line drawings and shaded vectors adds a simple dynamism to their aesthetic. These inspiring scenes symbolize Etsy's focus on creativity and connection.
Another craft brewery with a unique aesthetic, Lagunitas has a quirky vibe, from its retro aesthetic to its snarky humor. Its dog mascot appears in both intricate line drawings and shaded illustrations.
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Sketches of comedic scenes pop up throughout their digital presence. One even teaches us how to pronounce the brand's name!
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The nonprofit behind the Firefox browser is dedicated to making the Internet safer and more equitable. Throughout their website, they illustrate their core values with beautiful custom illustrations.
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With a handpainted appearance and vivid colors, Mozilla expresses its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and creativity.
A new health insurer focused on providing affordable coverage, Oscar puts humanity front and center with its custom illustrations. Rotoscoped photographs and painted scenes depict people in a more realistic way, yet avoid the insincere feeling of stock imagery.
Oscar brilliantly expresses its commitment to friendly healthcare and happy families with these emotional illustrations.
(All images sourced from Oscar.)
Wrapping Up
Custom illustration is a powerful way to give your brand a unique visual presence and express your core ideas in a meaningful way. From web images to social media headers to magazine covers, consider how you can tell a greater story with illustration.
