Whoever said visuals aren’t important for business never heard about content marketing. In fact, imagery is an essential part of every business, as it has a positive impact on customer engagement. According to the University of Minnesota research, the human brain process visual content 60,000 times faster than text. The image type that most web designers use today is clipart illustrations. There are a lot of advantages of using them in web design, including an easy customization process, low cost, balanced quality and small file size, and a great selection of clipart topics and styles.

Clipart illustrations are simple vector graphics, but they often come as a group of graphics on a single topic and style. Let’s look at different examples of clipart: science, sheep, and plant clipart.

Here’s what you need to know how to use clipart illustrations in web design.

How to create your own clipart illustrations

Whether you want to create a simple landing page or a whole website, you’ll need to learn how to create clipart illustrations. If you don’t have much experience in graphic design, it may seem like your only option is to pay a lot of money for someone else who will teach you how to do it. Good news: there are plenty of online tutorials and courses to learn how to create these graphics with professional software.

Below are 4 vector design software options that will help you:

  1. Inkscape. Inkscape ranks among the best free graphic design software for beginners. Despite the simplest interface and no hidden costs, it works well for hobbyists and people who have no design experience. You will need just a few tools to create your first clipart illustration. Pencil and shape tools equipped with embedded bitmaps and clones are among them. Moreover, you can customize illustrations taken from the Internet there with an SVG editing option.
  2. CorelDRAW. CorelDRAW is a vector design application created by the makers of Gravit. With a multi-asset export and multipage view, it provides you with a collaboration opportunity to work on clipart illustrations with your team, share feedback and leave comments in the design file. Its only drawback is the necessity of a strong internet connection for running 90% of the included software features.
  3. Adobe Illustrator. It’s probably the most popular design software in the world. But it can be hard for beginners to work there, as learning a huge amount of design options can take weeks and even months. And the fact that you know some graphic design basics doesn’t mean that it will comfortable to work with Adobe Illustrator. But its built-in training videos are very helpful and can help to you to learn Adobe software faster.
  4. Sketch. The sketch is a Mac-only, but powerful design tool. With its powerful vector editing features and great support, Sketch is a great software if you’re looking to create clipart illustrations in no time.

Where to find ready-made free clipart illustrations

It can be difficult to create your own illustrations with no experience, that is why many web designers prefer to use ready-made graphics from stocks. There are a lot of resources that offer clipart for free, but most of them lack style diversity. Moreover, their clipart collections are rarely updated with new ones. That is why it’s important to invest time into choosing the right stock resource for your web design. You can ask for advice from different design communities, and graphics designers on LinkedIn or simply chose the most popular stock resources on the web, like Adobe Stock, Freepik, or Shutterstock.

Advantages of using stock clipart illustrations

While stock illustrations are extremely popular among professional web designers, beginners can doubt whether they should use them. There is nothing bad in using stock clipart illustrations in your web design. On the contrary, there are 2 important advantages of using stock images:

Stock visuals are budget-friendly

When you just begin your web design journey, or your clients don’t have enough budget to cover the cost of hiring a professional illustrator to create original clipart, using stock visuals is the most cost-efficient option until there is enough money to hire a professional designer.

Stock visuals are easily available

As soon as you have only a few days to create a web design, it can be really handy to quickly find and download an image from the stock resources. All you have to do is to search for the content you need and get it. What is more, stock images always come in high-resolution, so you don’t have to waste your time on editing them.

The Bottom Line

Adding clipart illustrations in web design is definitely your way to success, as people love visual content. There are many ways in which you can use clipart illustrations in web design, including creating your own illustrations and downloading them from stock resources.

While both ways have the same goal, creating clipart illustrations by yourself can be a time-consuming process. That is why many web designers prefer to use stock images. They’re budget-friendly and easily available online.