Illustration: Ink sketch

Sketchy, hand-inked cartoons: a googly-eyed critter or object (a snail, a pair of worms, a potted cactus) whose body carries the coding metaphor, drawn with a wobbly brush pen over loose marker colour. It suits playful product moments: loading, errors, greetings, conflicts.

Boundary: for clean, even ~2 px ink outlines on people with flat fills, use illustration-outlined-cartoon. For people drawn with a black brush marker and one mint second colour, use illustration-two-colour-brush. For soft, unoutlined cosy animals with grain, use illustration-grainy-gouache.

Extracted from a set of 42 original design-and-coding cards in 14 styles; the three cards in examples/ are this style's shipped cards.

The look in one sentence

Every edge is a filled black brush polygon that swells from about 1 to 4.4 px and tapers to points, laid in a few separate strokes over a colour fill that slips 2 to 3.6 px past it, with dark areas hatched rather than filled.

Palette

Measured from the examples. Each colour family is base / dark / light; the dark goes into mottle and marker streaks, the light into one lit streak.