How to Generate Flat Illustrations for Your Website Design with Plugger?

I'd like to demonstrate how you can generate an illustration before going into detail.

Simply open the Plugger dashboard and choose the Flat Illustration Generator from the list of tools.

Provide the details of your flat illustration and select the desired size, such as square, landscape, or portrait.

With this tool, you have the ability to generate an unlimited flat illustrations.

Flat illustrations involve creating digital artwork with a minimalistic design, vibrant colors, and no complex detailing. This style places heavier emphasis on simplicity, often resulting in cartoony depictions of real life as well. This focus on simplicity and clarity sets flat illustrations apart from other styles such as hyperrealism.

This art style's simplicity yet flexibility also means that it finds applications in many real-world contexts and industries. It is especially popular in website design due to its ability to fit practically any theme or message that an organization wants to convey, making web layout illustrative but still content solid. Though flat illustrations are very trendy in today's age of digital media, they have a long history of artistic evolution. Flattening has just been hugely accelerating in popularity, as it is not just a new idea or trend.

The first instances of flat showing themselves in the broader cultural spotlight happened decades ago. The flat mindset has been growing and modernizing, with the acceptance of more playful and adventurous opportunities each year.

As we continue to see artists imagining and redefining what 'flat' means, we as an industry should be too. It is important to choose a style that fits the brand and the message trying to be told. Flat illustration can say things that some brands just can't in other illustrative styles.

1. Choosing the Right Flat Illustrations

Using flat illustrations for web projects is getting even more rewarding: modern digital artists seem to have dealt with their constraints, and there are tons of cool images for any goal. Nevertheless, a designer might spend hours choosing the right ones, and some questioning must precede this beautiful creative journey.

In particular, the right illustrations should correspond to the type of a website or app in order to avoid misunderstandings and meet target users' expectations. It might seem that engaging illustrations can brighten up any web page, and there's a grain of truth in this; however, the wise UX/UI practitioners advise making them not only beautiful but also relevant and trendy.

Where to begin? First and foremost, you should know who the company is in order to make the pictures "speak" in its tone of voice. Get ready for a deep dive into the corporate identity of the company, especially if there's no official style guide, or you're going to break it open.

In the case of any uncertainty, don't hesitate to consult with client representatives; just like your target audience, they hit the bull's-eye perception-wise. After you have found the brand's qualities, which are to be matched with the illustrations, and learned the main reasons for using the products or services, it's time to make a decision.

Listed below are the meeting-to-the-point cases emphasizing the right and wrong approaches to illustrate the website idea. For convenience, present the brand character and the final choice in your project's case study. And before illustrating the choice, think about the most matching illustration trends, which will be discussed further.

1.1. Understanding Your Brand Identity

Before selecting flat illustrations, the illustrators have to handcraft the brand identity. For most business owners, branding is planting logos and hatching a color scheme. However, brand identity runs straight from the purpose and mission of the business to the values and primary pillars of service, onwards to the behavior and appearance of the website itself.

It whispers in the comments field and roars in the social posts. Since brand identity is invisible, it is also sorely misunderstood. The quickest way to paint a clear picture of your brand identity is to home in on these key elements:

- Mission and Purpose: What purpose is the business striving to fulfill, and how does it benefit others?- Value Proposition: What makes the business different from, and relevant to, the stiff competition?

- Values and Personality: What organizational values guide strategic decisions and daily operations?

- Target Audience: Which customers stand to gain the most from the business's products and services?

Despite failing to understand it, most web operators have at least a vague idea that brand identity is worth reflecting in other website design elements. Designing custom flat illustrations presents a timely opportunity to walk through this process, ensuring that brand identity will resonate across even the newest website pages.

Failure to do so can only end in sharply polarized user experiences, where new web page illustrations inspire eye rolls or indifference. Designing in honor of brand identity ensures that business professionals, website users, potential business vendors, followers, and the uninspired illustrator can all scoop vision out of the same brand persona.

As such, integrating custom flat illustrations into website design can first start by understanding existing brand elements. Any craftsman should wield hues that are true to your company's branding and cut shapes that align with the under-the-hood narrative of a brand voice sorted through values that inform your brand.

1.2. Matching the Style to Website Theme

Flat illustration takes on different styles that can be used throughout the website. But is the style of the chosen illustration right for the chosen type of website?

Themes for websites can include lawyer offices or internet shops. Each of these themes has individual color schemes, the layout of the website, and themes used.

They should also be harmonized in one, the same style of flat illustration. If the style of illustrations used on the website does not go hand in hand with factors such as color, page layout, textures, icons, etc., and does not add charm, then it is worth considering a change of style.

Highly contrasting styles can disrupt the impact on the user and lead to rejection. Harmonizing matters of style, color, layout, effect on the viewer, and ease of adding flat illustrations to your website is presented in the next paragraphs.

Before adding flat illustrations, it is worth examining the overall look of a website. It is worth looking at areas such as color schemes, shapes, composition of page layout, icons, and buttons on the site. Look for a "commonality" among all these elements and introduce a flat illustration in a similar style.

The same applies to the selection of photos. Don't be misguided by brutal shapes and strong, vivid colors, and settle in the composition part.

Don't introduce spot flat illustrations in vibrant styles and assume that they will be a "hit" on the website. Such a method can - and usually does - cause a destructive effect. Users do not see harmony on the website, which impacts their engagement and makes them less likely to return.

2. Customization Techniques

There are techniques to make the illustration look more individual and suitable for a specific corporate website or the local audience. All of these techniques are based on the customization of existing flat illustration images. Creating variations To create many variants based on the same illustration, fix the main parts of the collage and edit a single element (color, object, or part).

It is better not to move the main objects—such as people or animals—between the pictures, or you will lose the entire style integrity. Color adjustments Global color adjustments are used to reduce the drama of the original illustration and make smaller accents. Another option is to use darker colors for more saturated and dramatic accent colors. Original color accents are not changed.

Moreover, it is possible to change the names of the colors based on the original ones, for example: Soft Purple and Dark Purple. Texture and offset Adding texture to flat illustration is not only good for variability, but it is also a good method to make the otherwise plain and unengaged picture livelier and more human-centered.

Trying to create different contrast backgrounds is another proven way to make the same collage more versatile. All these techniques enable configuring the illustrations in line with concrete brand guidelines, different user cultures and preferences, and notable specifics of a geographic area. Even the slightest editing of the illustration can change the general situation within it; that is why it is always necessary to have a brand character in mind.

Additionally, considering the many available illustrations, it is worth using some of the highlighted techniques for making the illustration more personalized and suitable for the website.

2.1. Color Adjustments

Naturally, when it comes to deciding on brand colors, we want to build an emotional connection. There's plenty of data out there on the psychological effects of individual colors, and experts agree that, when chosen effectively, they have a strong influence on customers' perceptions and actions. Before diving into flat illustrations, you should have already decided on your brand color.

Everyone knows or has already heard of the brand just based on the color red. Why not show off your own brand personality and be recognized for it while attracting potential clients?

Agree or disagree with some of the facts, knowing the psychographic details necessary for why you are using the colors you have chosen to overlay and eliminate the competition, or how they align with the mood you want to convey, helps us make use of this knowledge to build and customize a flat graphic.

Let's be honest, in the end, we need those illustrations to match our chosen color scheme! It can often be hit or miss when it comes to using a pre-existing illustration's color palette.

That is why it's so important to be able to adjust the colors of flat illustrations for our projects. Often, it's enough to add a little color over the top, and other times, the illustration requires far more. There are a number of apps that allow you to smoothly adjust colors.

Whether you're going for a simple or more complex style, one of the most important factors for adjusting your flat illustration colors is contrast. Ultimately, you'll want to keep the harmony between all the colors used, either as-is after adjusting them or before you get started with the adjustments. It's another consideration. I'll show you how to do that later on.

2.2. Adding Texture and Depth

While flat illustrations' flatness is a key design principle, illustrations are more engaging when they move beyond flatness, going for dynamic visuals. To pursue a truly eye-catching website illustration style, letting the designs step into the third dimension is important.

Your illustrations must seem dynamic and layered, and a shared way to go about it is through adding a sense of texture and depth. You retain the sense of flatness for a multi-layered effect by adding dimension to illustrations, shadows to objects, going in behind ones that are in the foreground.

It adds an extra stylistic element to website illustrations, in particular, which themselves often feature a hard edge style of design due to the clean sharpness of modern graphics technology.

When creating illustrations with some depth and texture, integrating patterns into the designs is an excellent method for doing so. When thinking about how to complement the different elements of an illustration with the primary objects and characters it features, the plaster texture above gives an extra hint of dimension and liveliness. Many are subtle, increasingly effective as well and enhance the immersive impression that multi-layered website illustrations bring.

The concession of these are wonderfully balanced; don't swamp the foreground object in too much crinkly texture as to make the image too busy or cluttered, while still leaving the desired impression!

Depth is increasingly vital for an illustration when intersecting the canvas in any way. Refine a sense of layered intrigue when you get the mix of texture and style right, stepping away from flat even more and not drowning your main subject in the process to make the illustration come to life wonderfully.

It is possible to overcomplicate the design process and create illustrations that overpower existing stylish touches on the website or presentation due to all of these new styles. Flat designers are also easily lured into unintentionally blending too many techniques, lest they outdo themselves and victory is downfall. In choosing how many highlights and techniques to add to an illustration, think carefully about what it is that makes it appealing; if it loses that then it may be the case to reign it in and retain clean lines for an original flat style. It complements, rather than detracts, from the hard-edged nature. A texturized background, on the other hand, might help to bring out the stylish, layered characters.

3. Integration into Website Design

This section explains the process of tightly integrating flat illustrations with website design. As a rule, illustrations are not used alone; they need to be seamlessly integrated into website design.

To be truly effective, illustrations should be placed thoughtfully and accommodate all user journeys across website headings. Ideally, you would need to create the right collection of brand-specific web design illustrations or pick a ready-made pack, choose a size and place for each element, and ensure that they are consistent in style and size across all website sections.

Designers are recommended to work on consistency across all web pages so that illustrations help to tell the complete story. As illustrations will always be present on certain key sections of a web layout, our wayfinding accessories had to be designed to harmonize with the placement of this image, promoting customer familiarity.

We wanted to have our product illustrations respond intimately to a variety of common real-life situations and everyday scenarios. In our case, based on the site content and incoming traffic stats, we aimed to use our illustrations just to showcase our offer, both visually and emotionally, using strongly engaging imagery.

We wanted to show our capabilities and provide a portfolio section and a blog post archive while easing pain points in a lively, colorful, and perky way to make people smile and enjoy working with us. Once your design is in place, certain unavoidable challenges may occur, and you'll need to respond to these accordingly as well.

The most important of these is the near-impossible placement of a story-led image at the end of a section, as it may be skipped over if a space-filling image from the next block is already in sight, and no possible DIY solutions were suggested. Adding some empty space, roughly a fifth of the standard spacing between different blocks, should do the trick, as pointed out by our lead illustrator as the fastest and most reliable solution.

Our tests revealed this to be true. A common difficulty faced by many variations occurs when the shape of the placement area is impractical. In such cases, we have found these to be adequate solutions: flushed to the bottom of the space-filling section as opposed to the top to distance it from the preceding one; increased in size to subdue its bottom edge and allow for an aesthetic margin to be seen in search engines and news aggregators.

Similarly, too high an illustration can be compensated for by spatially separating the previous block from it to balance out the composition. Overall, this design is recommended to be implemented as it has the potential to supercharge the overall presentation.

3.1. Placement and Sizing

Placement and sizing all depend on the website layout, purpose, and ultimately the idea behind it, although there are some general tips to keep in mind. It occurred to me that the content of the website should guide the illustration's placement and visibility.

For instance, various resources demand different kinds of treatment—topics, news, articles, utilities, blogs, newsletters, etc.—are structured in distinct ways and therefore have different illustration needs.

Platforms are structured differently as well; there are media platforms, SaaS automation platforms, e-commerce platforms, etc. Mediums can be just as important: magazines, portals, lifestyle blogs, corporate news, etc. Interface elements such as widgets, warnings, internal links to more articles, external newsletters, help subjects, etc. should guide the content’s hierarchy to prevent too many support materials vying for clicks.

In one of the examples, I applied the “rectangular layout” concept to the product page and the team page. It is, in essence, applying the variety but not the differences, enabling easy contemplation of the page’s various topics—the girl’s smile on the “who we are” block, for example, leads to her photo in the team section.

General visibility of elements is a thing to be able to influence the visitor. If an element is seen, the visitor can establish intimacy with it; if it is off-camera, they are free to neglect it. Via glasses or lenses, visitors verify intangible intimacy, which must have a primary sense of priority.

This is only one visual hierarchy of hundreds, but it is an interesting concept to use in daily layouts. In other situations, when visibility is completely appropriate, the size of an object, text, block, or illustration may depend on the space available.

On the front of a web page, for example, the title should always be bigger; for subdivisions, there is a rule to make the title one level larger than the text. So, within a single title—the header of a blog, for example—a user immediately knows which header is bigger. Near the bottom, two or more identical text files with different aesthetic references can be easily connected.

In a similar way, we place our thumbnail illustrations according to content categories. Across the homepage, illustrations are identical in terms of content value, but they differ in topics. In this methodology, each category can earn the same recognition.

We can show them in the same proportion of the frame that we can show the fonts used for each. In that way, we use their typefaces to personalize each category and suggest an illustrated album gallery, a cultural guide, PC games, and more tech as page categories.

Since there are numerous file sizes within the same category, ranging from 2 MB to 8 MB, the initial idea was to show them individually.

This will allow a user to select only one file size and not scour multiple category pages to find various photos. However, we decided that the blank space between pixels illustrates a discriminatory approach. While the distinction led to different weights for each category, it placed awkward importance on sizing.

The two “what's more” blocks would have potentially twice the space on the homepage as they ought to have because they consist of two categories. So we created a more inclusive way to differentiate between the two sizes of file illustrations.

3.2. Consistency Across Pages

It might be challenging to come up with individual illustrations for all pages of your website. However, the real challenge lies in making sure that each page of your website is consistent.

Despite unique elements in each illustration, all of them should be united by the same style and color palette. If pictures are different, users may get confused and think they are on the wrong pages.

Every section of the site should have illustrations in the same style, so do not overrate the diversity of such visuals. Check brand guidelines to be aware of previous UI solutions that proved to work. It is common for brands to apply logos, slogans, and other elements to their landing pages, so why not connect illustrations in one design setting? When creating this illustration, make sure to follow your own brand guidelines.

All pages of your website have to make up a well-thought-out chain. In fact, users should not feel the page borders, so they will be willing to slip into another section after studying the features of a blog, forum, or any other units.

The same task is set for flat illustrations on the pages that your website consists of. The new section should look absolutely relevant to its predecessor, so images have to be designed in the same style, color, and adopt the same thematic approach. This is highly important if you want users to feel at ease on different sections of your website, especially if they have just discovered your landing page.

At first, users may be impressed with one landing page illustration and thus slide over the entire website to appreciate more visual delights. Consistent pictures also help to maintain the positive image of your website and develop the loyalty of visitors.

Regularity of the illustration style sets out the attention to the quality of your website as a whole. However, if you want to refresh such a large set of visuals, you need to carry out illustrations from section to section. Being a drawn expression of a website, an illustration should adapt to the entire website design setting.

Therefore, today you may create a charming flat illustration and in several months redesign every page of your website, but now with new user requirements and your fresh influential ideas.

4. Conclusion and Best Practices

Any illustration can be customized for a website to drive brand personality and entice users through custom colors and branding elements that communicate a specific message.

By understanding the aesthetic vibes in branding, selecting a suitable flat illustration style, and knowing helpful tips for editing or customizing flat illustrations with brand elements and colors while maintaining a cohesive brand identity, illustrations can help explain a concept, create a personal connection, and guide a user toward other elements of the page. Here are some quick tips for getting the most out of your illustrations: - Pair them with written information.

Every combination is a match made in design heaven. - Make sure the message matches. - Be consistent. - Have a little fun. In conclusion, integration must never take place on a “just because” or “everybody else is doing it” basis. Illustrations must be paired with written information if a web developer or a team charting the potential customers’ purchasing journey wants to provide the user with more context. More often than not, they may need to be customized, as free illustrations hardly ever directly communicate brand personality to the public. Illustrations may be excellent as they are, but they may need to be modified.

Unlike professional associations, artistic professions are capable of making use of patterns, colors, and compositions as professional tools and designing from a highly creative aspect, thus having less socially verifiable norms.

To stay on top, never stop learning. The following are some best practices: - Make a selection of four or five favorites to convey consistency between the web pages. - Pair the flat illustration style with the brand's aesthetic values. - Give trial and error a whirl as needed. As a general rule, there is no definite way to modify an illustration.

Drawing can be used to connect users of all kinds. Of course, there are general guidelines and suggestions that we can use to corroborate the choices we make. If the illustrations on your website get a lot of attention, you might want to think about investing in an analysis to determine which ones genuinely cause an increase in time on the web page or user engagement.