Bye Bye Boring Stock Photos. Hello Illustrations, You Beautiful Design Trend
A model with the perfect smile and the clichéd pose or a quirky illustration, full of, ironically, life that no stock photo can ever produce — which do you think works from a design and a UX perspective in 2019?
Sure, stock photos have their value and can be used in certain situations, but the beauty of an illustration is that, not only does it look original, it gives the consumer that personalized feeling. And considering the lengths that companies go, to get the customer hooked, to make them feel like they are the be-all and end-all — which they kind of are — personalizing content, personalizing design is the way to go.
Illustrations give the designer an opportunity to tell the story the way they want to tell it. From a customer’s perspective, illustrations gives a website/product that personality, which goes a long way in converting leads to actual results.
Indeed, studies suggest customized images or illustrations convert seven times better than stock photos. Take a breath and read it again — that’s 7 times! Seven times!
What more proof is needed that spending a little extra time on illustrations is far, far better than getting that hero model in, posing like there is no tomorrow and hoping the consumers relate to it.
Now, that the importance of illustration has been made duly clear, let’s take a look at the various kinds of illustrations that are being used in design in 2019, and is expected to “trend” for the rest of the year.
Hand drawn is back in business:
You see some of the designs in recent history, and you might get that “this is nice, but this doesn’t feel real to me,” feeling. Considering the consumers — especially the millennials and the ones younger than them — are all about keeping it real and natural, hand-drawn designs are going to be the thing.
Think of that splash of originality you can bring to a design by making it hand-drawn, or at least giving a feel that it is produced by hand, rather than via some cute, but impersonal device.
You only need to go to Instagram to see how the youngsters are viewing and posting photos nowadays. The “perfect” poses are passé. They are not what the audience want anymore. It is all about getting natural and being real; and there is nothing more natural and real than hand-drawn illustrations.
Get nice and vintage with the grain effect:
Staying on the too-digital-is-too-impersonal thought, grain effect was a huge trend in 2018, and that is expected to continue all the way through this year as well.
Again, all of social media is hooked on to the grain effect, with various influencers and celebrities using the grain effect filter to give their photos a vintage look.
Designers are taking the vintage feel to the next level as well, by marrying the grain effect with tech.
How about a futuristic robot, sitting inside a dome, doing its thing. Pictured it? Now picture it with a grain effect, making all of that future stuff, look, well, a little old, and maybe, with it, more relatable.
So, what that does is it gives the consumer a futuristic feeling — through what is actually in the picture — along with a cosy, “hey, I can relate to this” emotion, which immediately gives them that “I like these guys, they are pretty cool,” emotion.
What more can a designer ask for than that?
Hello 90s, we’ve missed you:
If you follow fashion, you might have noticed a few styles of the 1980s and 90s creeping in last year. Well, that style has caught on with illustrations as well, dude!
Look for the use of loud and bright colors, while also seeing plenty of solid colors and lines. There is also the camcorder/old camera effect we were talking about above coming in more to produce those glitch effects and give it a proper 1980s and 1990s look.
Now all we need in the background is some Backstreet Boys (oh, c’mon you know you love them).
Got to have a little AR in there:
Now that we have gotten the vintage and natural stuff out of the way, let’s get into the tech, AR space. Augmented Reality has caught on like wildfire over the last couple of years — yup, Pokemon, it’s all your fault — and, it was bound to catch on with illustrators too.
Getting AI into illustrations is not easy, but considering the talent that’s out there, it was never going to be a “nope, can’t be done,” situation either.
The tricky bit is getting the right balance — keeping it an illustration, while also bringing in AI elements into it.
This is being done through animation and, particularly, hover-over AR technology.
Once the illustrators get a proper feel for it, this form is going to be the trend that is really likely to catch on, and stick for a while.
And plenty of Isometric too:
Isometric illustrations are all about trying to get the 3D effect in 2D. Drawing or illustrating a 3D product in 2D. This was a huge trend in 2018, and there are absolutely no signs, so far, which suggests this trend is going to come to an abrupt end in 2019.
Isometric illustrations gives you the “this looks complicated” feeling, which works well with the consumers, because they are not only wowed by the 3D in 2D effect, they also feel like a lot of work has gone into it, which immediately lends more credibility to the product/website.
The more credible the product/website is, the more seriously the consumer will take it, which turns into a proper a win-win.
