I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard

A homeowner hired an environment illustrator to turn a hand-drawn depiction of their house into a usable Home Assistant dashboard so the whole family would actually enjoy interacting with smart devices. The commissioning process focused as much on technical deliverables as on style: a simple architectural plan, room photos, color codes, and explicit instructions to export every asset on one shared canvas at the same size. Each device needed separate layer files (still “off” images and short animated loops for “on”), plus day and night versions; animated WebP files were recommended for smoother playback. The author notes practical tips - ask for WebP from the artist, export all pieces aligned on a single canvas, and prepare separate garden states - because getting the artwork right saved days of later alignment work.

Technically, the dashboard uses Home Assistant’s picture-elements card with the illustration as background and devices placed as elements that swap images based on state (state_image). Day/night is handled by a helper and conditional overlays; tapping devices opens Home Assistant’s control dialogs or custom pop-ups built with Browser Mod for complex items like irrigation. Images are served from /config/www, and to display the dashboard full-time on a TV the build uses the HAOS Kiosk Display add-on over HDMI. YAML-driven includes let the same element definitions be reused across per-floor and an “exploded” full-house view, and CSS via card-mod positions stacked cards to work around card nesting limits. The result is an attractive, family-friendly, animated home control panel.