People & Character Illustrations

Character illustrations: choosing a set you can keep using

The difficult part of character work is rarely the first picture. It is the second one, from a different angle, pretty much later, when the same person has to turn up in a new part of the product and still look like themselves.

Animation ran into this early and solved it on paper. By the late 1930s, Disney had a department for it, led by Joe Grant, producing sheets that standardized a character's proportions, angles, and expressions in one place. The sheets were copied on a photostat machine and handed to everyone drawing that character, so a dozen different hands would produce the same face, and Grant marked the approved version himself with "OK, J.G." After that, anything off the sheet was unapproved.

Buying character illustration is more or less the same question. Some sets behave like a model sheet, with one person you can rebuild in new poses, while others are groups of strangers who happen to share a drawing style. The second kind is perfectly good for a landing page. But it will let you down as soon as a product flow requires a single recognizable person across multiple situations.

Places a character set has to work

• Onboarding flows, empty states, and error screens in a product.
• Explainer pages for services that are hard to photograph: insurance, banking, logistics.
• Internal communications, HR material and training decks.
• Public information and healthcare campaigns that need people without naming anyone.
• Children's publishing and educational material.
• Pitch decks and conference slides, where a figure carries the point faster.

Working with illustrated people

Ask whether the same person has to come back, and ask it before you buy a pack. If a product needs one recognizable face across twelve screens, the set has to be built around that person. For a landing page or a deck, it genuinely does not matter, so do not pay for the harder thing when the easy one covers you.

Look at how it is drawn, because the drawing carries almost all of the tone. The same woman at the same desk reads modern and light as a contour line, formal and institutional as an engraving, and handmade and slightly awkward as a collage cut-out. When a brief says nothing except that it needs people, that is the question to take back — what is the page supposed to feel like?

Most illustrated people look like stock because of how they're placed: whole, upright, and all at the same size. Crop into them so they run off the edge, let type overlap a shoulder, change the scale between one figure and the next, and drop any pose that repeats something already on the page.

Ways people get drawn in these sets

• Line art figures. Single-weight contour drawing, often romantic or seasonal in subject. Recolors directly and scales without trouble, perfect for stationery design.
• Collage cut-outs. Figures cropped out of printed matter and supplied on transparency, carrying their original halftone and paper with them.
• Historical portraits and engravings. Renaissance and classical figures taken from old plates. Fixed resolution, dense hatching, and a formality do most of the work in a layout.
• Occupational and scene sets. People shown doing something, e.g., working, drinking coffee, traveling, where the activity matters most.
• Figures with type. Illustrations packaged with quotes and lettering, meant to be used as a finished composition.