Inclusive Illustrations: A Powerful Design Choice That Speaks to All
Illustrations can work wonders for your marketing content. When a consumer visits a website, they spend about 10-20 seconds on a website before leaving (and even less on social media). That gives you a tiny window of time to make an impression.
Illustrations can convey key information in a quick and seamless way. And while doing that, they support the development of your brand’s visual identity! Let’s consider one of the alternatives – stock photography. A brand’s reliance on stock photography can make them appear unoriginal and, sometimes, disingenuous. And if we’re honest, stock photography just doesn’t allow for the same level of consistency and recognition that illustrations provide. If you want your brand to be memorable and cohesive across all platforms, illustrations are valuable and a great way to strengthen your brand!
However, there are ways in which businesses can dampen the potential and power of illustrations. They can fail to represent their diverse target audience. Inclusive illustrations point to an inclusive brand. And as a brand, that’s what you want to be. Remember, people are more likely to show interest in your product if they see themselves reflected in your brand. Inclusive illustrations show your customers they belong and are considered.
So, how do we go about creating inclusive illustrations? What are the first steps?
First, we need to challenge our current creative process. Maybe you’re about to create illustrations of developers. And maybe, when you search ‘developers,’ Google only brings up pictures of men. But before you roll with that thought don’t forget… women developers exist too. If you only present one type of developer, your brand fails to welcome diversity (not sure if your brand welcomes diversity? Speak to us about our Inclusive Content Audit.)
Inclusive illustrations have a place in your internal content too. Maybe you’re about to develop fictional buyer personas for your team… This gives you a golden opportunity to welcome diversity. Go ahead and gather the demographic data from your website and social media (age, location, gender etc). And then, make use of inclusive illustrations to give your team real insight into the range of potential customers they’re creating for. These are just a couple of examples to highlight how inclusive marketing can support companies to make long-term changes, both internally and externally. Through inclusive illustrations, businesses can create small ripples of positive change.
But of course, marketing has the potential to cause harm too…
As well as reinforcing stereotypes, marketing content can mistakenly perpetuate stereotypes. When using or creating illustrations of people from different ethnicities, be careful not to exaggerate race through accessories or facial features. Avoid, for example, exaggerating the eyes of an East-Asian character and giving them chopsticks. If you’re afraid of ‘tackling’ race, you might be tempted to avoid race altogether by using random colours. Why not make all the characters blue? Wouldn’t that uncomplicate things? Well… thanks to our biases as a society, yellow becomes white by default. Would we have ever perceived the Simpsons to be anything other than white? Plus, yellow skin can denote something entirely different in another culture, like death or a godly figure. Using other colours for skin tone is risky business and isn’t a firm move towards inclusivity. Think about emojis. While not a perfect solution, the introduction of different skin tones for emojis marks a step towards inclusion. Doing the same for your illustrations is a good place to start.
Inclusive illustrations are not just the future, they belong to the now. It’s important your brand’s design language includes your diverse audience. However, it’s OK if you aren’t there yet. We can help you make moves towards inclusive marketing. If you’re managing your marketing yourself, check out the resources below to help you create changes. If you’d like our support in creating an inclusive marketing strategy, get in touch. We’re happy to help.