I have hopefully enhanced my artist site, albeit in a very small way by adding some handwritten notes in graphics form (i.e. these are images of text). I did this in response to a couple of navigational issues I spotted when I witnessed a first time visitor (who is not a big internet user) trying to use my site. One issue was the main navigation wasn't easy to for them to spot, and the other, it wasn't immediately obvious to click on an image to enlarge it. That said, we are talking about someone quickly scanning a web page, but isn't that what we all do most of the time? When I have the time, I shall probably re-design the navigation, but for now I have opted for adding "notes" to highlight navigation, and to draw attention to the phrase "Click here to view image larger". You can check out examples of this on my Portrait Gallery/Art Commissions page
Generally, I would NOT recommend using graphics in place of text because search engines cannot read the text in images. As Google put it:
Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.
Source: Google-Friendly sites - Webmasters/Site Owners Help: Things to Avoid
In my case I have used the graphics very sparingly, and not for important written content. If you're interested in hand-written/hand-drawn web design styles, there's a great article on Smashing Magazine: Hand-Drawn Style In Modern Web Design.
