When to generate artwork

Code-drawn wins for UI, type, geometry, and 3D; illustration-led hero art comes from an image model, animated as layers.

Code-drawn HTML/CSS/SVG excels where the medium is native: UI mockups, typography, geometric shapes, charts, pixel art, and 3D via Three.js. For illustration-led hero art — characters, painterly scenes, sculptural objects — hand-drawn SVG tops out at clipart quality no matter how well you prompt. The fix is a hybrid:

Generate the hero artwork as an image (via the media-use skill’s image generation), then animate it with code. Anything that must move independently — eyelids, light beams, drawing lines — stays a code layer on top of the static art.

Three rules that make this work:

1. Generate on a solid contrasting background (magenta works) so the subject keys out cleanly. A light subject on a light background gets silently eaten.
2. Key flat vector-style art with a chroma key (ffmpeg colorkey), not AI background removal — remove-background’s matting model is tuned for photographic and human subjects and reads flat art unreliably, sometimes keeping the background instead of the subject. Reserve remove-background for photographs.
3. Put a restraint clause in the generation prompt (“minimal, lots of negative space”) — image models fill the frame by default, and a busy generated texture reads as cheap as bad vector art.

The difference, side by side

The same brief — four people arm in arm, warm gradient sweaters, flat-illustration style — built both ways. Same animation beats, same craft layer (lighting, atmosphere, grade); the only variable is where the figures came from.

Hand-drawn SVG figures — clean, but the proportions and gesture read as clipart.

Generated illustration animated as layers — real anatomy and editorial shading; the animated line still passes behind the figures because the artwork was keyed to transparency.