Compelling Visuals and Storytelling in Your Website Design

Finding the right visuals to use in your website design has as many challenges as deciding how much text you need to use. The ratio between visuals and text needs an even balance, even if some people still think images are slowly usurping text. While it depends on the context of your site and what you’re trying to convey, there isn’t a doubt that images are more important than ever in branding.

Visuals in web design are also evolving quickly with some recent new effects adding amazing qualities. No matter what career you’re in, many of these can help your site come alive and make your business or industry look more appealing.

Consider integrating these visual ideas into more interactive elements so you can enhance a sense of storytelling into your design. The more you can tell a story that resonates with targeted, first-time visitors, the more you can connect personally and show a consolidated method of communication.

While website imagery trends ultimately come and go, these elements are possibly here to stay when combined with stylistic typography.

Website Design: Hand-Drawn Illustrations

It’s amazing to think hand-drawn illustrations would ever get used in web design. Yet, it almost seems inevitable in the age of more simplification. If drawing illustrations by hand became a part of life when creating marketing designs before the age of Internet (or office computers), it’s ironic to see it go full circle in the digital age.

You can see online examples of how hand-drawn illustrations look in the field of web design. Some of them look designed on a computer, though others have the definite look of a doodle done on a piece of paper.

These bring unique style to your website as a way to add a little humor in your visuals, or for an anti-digital feel.

A Series of Photos to Tell a Story

You may have seen a few main pages on websites using a series of static images to tell a story with minimal typography. For a while, large full-screen background photos were a popular trend to convey an idea in one image. You don’t see this as much now, and using four or five still photos put together can do more to tell about what your company philosophy is.

Make sure each photo fits the theme so you create the proper mood. Also create the photos in high-resolution so viewers see every detail.

The Increasing Use of Cinemographs

Cinemographs are a trademarked design concept that many websites use lately to a somewhat haunting effect. While context matters in their use, these mysterious GIFs show a still image with movement in one part of the photo. The moving object could be shifting eyes on someone’s face, or a random object swinging back and forth in a breeze.

You see this used considerably on Instagram to give an effect of eavesdropping on a live image, despite being static. These are always fascinating to look at and can easily tell a story without using up too much bandwidth.

Despite video popularity, they could easily slow your site down to a crawl. Consider the use of Cinemographs as the new step forward in imagery where you can tell a lot about yourself in one compelling shot.

The great news to this is you can make your own Cinemographs on something as simple as your iPhone. For a website, though, it’s best to have a professional website design one for you so it’s done correctly and on a larger scale.