Sign language was for the first time officially documented in the 18th century but even today we have not developed a collective way to illustrate sign language movements to be as informative as possible. The purpose of this essay is to investigate how illustrative and graphic elements influence informative and functional aspects of sign language illustrations. The research question is — how can graphic elements and illustration styles affect the understanding of sign language instructions? My research is based on theories about informative design. In order to answer the question a semiotic analysis is carried out combined with a systematic observation and four interviews regarding six illustrations. The result from the investigation is that the most important graphic element is the arrow and that it is important that the image focuses on the movement. The conclusion that can be drawn is that unnecessary details make the images too difficult to read and should be avoided.