thank you! the TOC is autogenerated, honestly what i need more is someone to go thru and see if the heading hierarchies make sense since this grew organically over time
I'm not sure what it is about this style of drawing ( which does look great ), but when I see it, it feels too "corporate" or too "marketing" oriented and I don't really relate to it. It tends to trigger my "bullshit" detector. Probably because it's far too abused.
The style is sometimes called 'Alegria art' or 'Corporate Memphis' [1] and is explicitly aimed at being inclusive. But megacorps have overused and it's cliche, garish and bland now. Luckily, there are communities dedicated to erasing this aesthetic scorch from our zeitgeist [2].
At least when I think of "Corporate Memphis" I think of weirdly disproportional humans.
To the credit of the poster none of the humans I saw in these illustrations looked like their parents had a run in with radiation or nasty pesticides or anything.
I.e. and to be clear: Unlike most other such illustrations I found these to be nice.
I'm so sick of these inoffensive, unremarkable, totally forgettable blob people that I'm going with an anthropomorphic kitsune as our corporate mascot.
- Stripe-like header.
- 3 key benefits side by side.
- Unsubstantiated sponsors and awards list.
- Information density: 20 words per viewport height.
- Weirdly shaped human pudding figures.
- Wavy curve backgrounds because we can.
- Card-based design philosophy, formerly known as "boxes".
Anyone else find it odd that the colors are (somewhat) customizable, but the skin tones aren't? I know that there's more to making a set of illustrations like this properly inclusive beyond just skin tone, but that seems like a strange omission given that the feature was already created.
The paragraph from our license which says that you can't use products to create templates, and so on, applies to our templates (containing code), not illustrations.
I appreciate the response. As others have noted though, the licensing terms are very hard to parse. Have you considered using one of the Creative Commons licenses for the artwork, with commonly used software licenses for the software pieces?
That's not how the MIT license works though. It says: "Permission is hereby granted, [...] without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software"
I’ve long been wondering: I have a need for probably 3-6 custom vectors every 3-6 months. I want them to be consistent in style, colour etc. how can I go about finding an artist to do this for me? I’m happy to pay for quality, or use open source work if I find a good set, but currently I don’t know where to start
I do illustrations, you can see my works at: https://ekfos.artstation.com/. If you like them, get in touch. Mods: not sure if such a post is welcome here; delete if you think it doesn't fit. There was not email attached to
hsbauauvhabzb so I couldn't email him.
Behance[1]. I've hired a number of illustrators and artists off there and the work has been fantastic, and surprisingly reasonably priced. It takes a bit of interviewing to find someone who's available who has a style you like.
For a tiny icon it would have been a reasonable compromise in interest of readability at low resolution, but here it just comes across as a sloppy mistake.
Shameless plug, we have a good set of illustrations on https://www.storyset.com/. The big difference is StorySet illustrations can be animated and the styles are different. Both products are quite complementary.
Excellent question… we don’t have a separate subscription for StorySet, but you can download all these illustrations in Freepik.com without attributing if you subscribe to Freepik.
It’s an oversight that we don’t allow explicitly in the terms of use of the Freepik subscription to use content downloaded from StorySet without attribution. Let me try to fix that tomorrow.
Sorry the system is not straightforward, StorySet is a side project and we didn’t think of monetizing it.
I'm working on a free and open source Windows app to both learn and demo the new C++ coroutines. I realized one metaphor for how they're implemented is a Choose Your Own Adventure story.
I wanted to have pictures with the text and choices, but although I can draw I didn't want to spend that kind of time for something that's a supporting element to the main point of the work.
These illustrations look like they'd work well for that! Unlike some of the other free image sites people shared, I think the enveloping backgrounds you provide with the foreground people and objects lends itself to storytelling use.
This is my favorite of these collections. Consistent style, not too many different fills (to change colors), and quite easy to mix and match different illustrations.
Years ago when I discovered undraw I thought so too. Now, after seeing hundreds of them on various websites, the site of them instantly sours my perception of the brand and cheapens the perceived quality. I understand why they are so over-used though. Illustration is hard!
The illustrations are not nearly as cringey as the Alegria style ones I see nearly everywhere now. More reminiscent of 90s corporate Memphis. Getting Micrografx Designer flashbacks.
This is excellent! And the license is on the home page: "MIT License: Use it on commercial or personal projects. Every design component we use to create our products can be downloaded for free under MIT License."
-You can’t use our products to create Templates, UI Kits, Dashboards, Themes and Plugins that are distributed on your website or other marketplaces and they do direct competition to us.
-You can’t deliver our source code to the general public through Open Source Projects without our written consent.
-You can’t use our products to create website/app generators.
-You can’t redistribute or resell our products source files as they are."
I think paragraph (5) of https://www.creative-tim.com/license?ref=iradesign-footer applies here "There can be different components in some of our Items that can have a separate License from this one, and other license terms may apply to that specific component. Usually, those components come with a Free and Open Source MIT License."
No worries! You can use the illustrations as you want.
You can just give credits if you want.
The paragraph from our license which says that you can't use products to create templates, and so on, applies to our templates (containing code), not illustrations.
Wait... what? The MIT license applies only to the illustrations? The MIT license is specifically a software license and doesn't really work for illustrations, except to the extent that they make up the software's associated documentation. Can you elaborate what this means? I would have expected exactly the opposite: that the code is MIT licensed and the illustrations are under your custom license. The reverse is a very bizarre arrangement.
It seems to me that the MIT license isn't really involved at all here. It can't apply to standalone illustrations, because MIT is a software license, and you're not open sourcing the code. What, specifically, is MIT licensed here?
For illustrations you want something like Creative Commons. Those licenses are not software-specific like MIT is.
I'd recommend looking into known licenses like the Creative Commons license set for the artwork. For the software part of your product check the most used open source licenses, including the copyleft ones if you want to keep the option to negotiate commercial deals.
Sorry to be a Scrooge, but I wish people would stop doing this. It's hard enough to make a living as an illustrator in the age of digital photography and photobashing without having to compete with generic (which I mean both descriptively and—sorry—pejoratively) illustration libraries. This stuff undermines the discipline and suggests that its skills are easily acquired and the work is easily done, so there's no reason to compensate people for it.
There's a lot of talk on HN about the importance of paying for things, and while I know that most of that is in opposition to 'paying' with your privacy, which is very different from what I'm addressing here, I think the basic idea of value still applies. It's important to pay for shit sometimes. Forget the ethics of supporting your peers and just think about how it'll get you better quality, custom work.
Open-source is awesome, and I totally support anyone fighting that fight, but this kind of work is pretty clearly aimed at startups trying to penny-pinch their way into the brand signaling and associations afforded by adopting the corporate memphis look. Maybe that's an unfair read, but I can't remember the last time I saw an unfunded open-source project trying to look like every VC-backed lifestyle app that launched over the last six years.
On a particularly bad day, I can't help but feel like this kind of project is leading toward the centralization of art as a whole. It's undeniably stagnating commercial artistry.
Sincerely,
Someone who is still butthurt about Squarespace, et al. killing off small and solo web design/dev shops.
Solo web design/dev is an industry that appeared out of nowhere, filled a massive void for a while, and that vacuum is collapsing in on itself with Squarespace and efforts like this one as the once-impenetrable field becomes commonplace.
But Ikea and custom carpenters coexist. Tailors/seamstresses and Macy's coexist. Programmers and designers will have to learn to live in a world where Squarespace and Wordpress are accessible enough that a startup or small business can hack something together that's good enough for a while without employing an artist.
The industry won't go away completely, but the fraction if it which can be replaced by cheap or free mass-produced/general-purpose products will be.
I'm curious, do you feel this way about open source software as well? Does it cheapen the value of being a developer? If not, why do you think art is different and why is open source art a bad thing?
I would say open source creates new opportunities for developers. Instead of paying a developer to implement their own JS view library and then use it to solve a problem, you hire the developer to use React to solve 2 problems.
That said there is an aspect of AWS (etc.) making money off the back off the efforts of certain open source projects.
Stock illustrations on the other hand are a direct replacement for artist's work. If I find a logo online, I don't need to pay someone to design a logo.
I love and highly value open-source software. I try to donate to the creators of every piece of it I use, and make a rule of it if I intend to use it commercially. I admire open-source developers and hope for all of them to make a great living doing what they do, regardless of whether they themselves want that.
That said, yes, I think it's undeniable that offering one's work for free decreases its value in the market. Is that inherently bad? Certainly not, but it does make it harder to make a living doing it. Devs are doing okay right now because of how things are going—illustrators, not so much.
Projects like this rub me the wrong way for two reasons:
1. I've personally lost several contracts to people who charged very little or nothing for the (oftentimes very good) work they do for well-funded, plenty-capable-of-paying-fair-wages companies. I fully recognize this is just sour grapes, but hey, I'm eatin' 'em. Wouldn't you be frustrated to lose work to someone offering to do it for free for a client who intended to get rich using it?
2. Illustrations like these are, these days, intrinsically commercial and aimed at customer acquisition for businesses. These are for marketing; for raking in money. They aren't being presented as (though I concede they could be used as) jumping off points for artistic exploration or further creative development. I recognize others may not agree with me here, but that makes them somewhat antithetical to the open-source … cause? attitude? whatever.
A possible third, but more loosey-goosey point is that because the effectiveness and quality of illustration is much more subjective and difficult to measure than software:
Reasonably efficient functionality seems to be a satisfactory baseline for most people evaluating software, so that gives them a way to make a rudimentary cost analysis on it. A free, open-source search tool is great if what you need is a search tool, but if you need a membership management system, you can't just throw the free search tool on your site and call it good.
With illustration, however, 'screen that vaguely resembles a dashboard', or 'people in a meeting', or 'someone walking through a park' can all theoretically be used to visually communicate countless different service offerings or brand principles (which is precisely what makes these libraries so popular and effective), especially if you don't have a tuned or critical eye, or simply don't have much incentive to care about being more precise. It's therefor much more possible and more likely that a company can go years making tons of money without ever paying a penny for illustrations, despite those illustrations potentially being of great value to them. Which, yeah, bravo for them, I guess? But that sucks for illustrators.
I appreciate your polite and thoughtful response :) That being said, I don't really feel convinced that there is a difference. I think that just as open source software doesn't solve every need, the same goes with art and there will always be value for the people who can create original work and there will always be people who don't value that. Honestly, it sounds like a bullet dodged if you lost a contract to a client who thinks that way. They probably still wouldn't value you very highly and would likely be a bad client. That's my philosophy for freelance work. I feel like it's a common problem across industries. If what you do actually is more valuable than something available for free, it is no threat. Fundamentally someone will need your service if they can't actually get it for free. The people who think the free substitutes are better will probably learn that the hard way and there are others out there who will know better. And if what you do is not more valuable, then I think it's not a bad thing that you don't get paid, because you should make money for providing value. You gotta keep yourself marketable with valuable skills.
I think you might just be a bit more optimistic than I am, as I myself am not convinced that quality (by non-monetary measurements) will win (or even survive) in the end D:.
this comes up every single time someone shares their work for free. look, i have some sympathy for you, and yes it leads to devaluing some work by people who don't value your work, but people are going to keep doing it for exposure, you don't have the power to stop them, so accept that this is a thing and find the people who DO value your work. you have a powerful, awesome skill that I'd kill to have. I hope you realize how prized you are by the people that can't do what you do.
You're right—I don't have the power to stop them, and thank goodness for that! I've certainly considered whipping up my own illustration library and selling it in packages. It's just smart business, like selling typeface licenses instead of only offering custom treatments.
I accept that this is how things are, but I also think it's okay to be unhappy about it :].
And like anyone, I do appreciate the appreciation of others who appreciate my skillset and offering. But also like anyone, I can't help but wish more people did!
I regret that I can only upvote this once. Art is my job and I feel much the same way. I have managed to find a set of clients whose desires are better met by custom art with a distinct personal style but, y'know, it'd be nice if "shitting out some Corporate Memphis at a price point appropriate to a startup sitting on piles of VC money" was an option for me and a bunch of other illustrators too. We got bills to pay.
Or ya know, since all these sites want basically the same look you could start a community illustration library the sources contributions from the body of companies that want this kind of look to everyone involved's mutual benefit.
What value are you gaining by having 20 companies pay 20 designers to make the same generic uninspired designs because the clients want it to "look like $every_other_tech_company.?"
> What value are you gaining by having 20 companies pay 20 designers to make the same generic uninspired designs because the clients want it to "look like $every_other_tech_company.?"
You're employing people, which has some value to an ostensibly equitable society (lord knows most jobs are very similar and could be streamlined, consolidated, etc.), but yeah, I'm in agreement that it's a pretty crap situation beyond that.
Which is part of my problem with stuff like this—it encourages and embraces that homogenization. Set aside compensation, value, etc., and I'm just sick of seeing the same shit on every website and want to dissuade people from making more of what we already have in excess.
Yeah, it's one of those things where it's not a big deal if the audience sees it for what it is, because in that case, the company is getting out of it what they put into it.
What sucks is when people are so conditioned to expect a particular aesthetic or asset class (as with corporate memphis) that they just ignore it anyway, effectively justifying going the cheap route. "If our customers don't care about our illustrations anyway, why would we pay for custom ones?" If your illustrations don't matter, why are you using any in the first place?
> "really bad stock photo"
Ironically, really bad stock photos usually come with a licensing fee.
But... is anyone else growing tired of the sales-pitch we're all using? And do any of us find it valuable for ourselves when we read them? We've trained ourselves (collectively, as an industry) to expect a specific type of one-page: hero image, call-out-message with CTA, then abstract illustrations combined with text about how great something is. I don't know what I want in it's place (let's be honest, I'm clearly no marketing expert!), but what we've landed on has an incredibly bad signal:noise ratio.
> is anyone else growing tired of the sales-pitch we're all using?
Not growing, been there for years. Another common annoyance is when they have a pricing page that ultimately asks you to schedule a phone call with their salespeople (not applicable here, but a common sales pattern for these sorts of things).
> I don't know what I want in it's place
The core of the problem IMO is that so much of these sorts of pages are filled with fluff that doesn't communicate very well about the product (or maybe it does, but not at a level that I will ever engage with, like case studies). One solution in some cases is to put a video demo of the product front and center.
Look at https://about.gitlab.com/ for example. To some extent it's following the same pattern, but when you load the page the first thing you see is a pair of buttons. Get a free trial or watch a video demo. I'm annoyed they make it so hard to find their FOSS Community Edition (IMO that's a far better "free trial" than the one you have to sign up for), but just judging the landing page, the first thing you see is a CTA to get more information. The OP's page's first visual doesn't have that. You actually can't even find an actionable link until you've scrolled all the way to the bottom (if we ignore the top bar).
Another annoyance of mine is the marketing cheapening of words like "awesome" and "amazing", which is in full force in OP. In marketing copy (and in common vernacular among some people) they're just white noise. It's a fun exercise to rewrite marketing copy with all the adjectives removed.
Marketing criticism aside, though, I like the interactive element on OP. It's unnecessary, but cute.
For me, sort of yes but also no. It's kind've a wash actually. As you pointed out, this type of design is so common it doesn't really make the site bad or good, just "normal." On the other hand, poorly done designs set off red flags. So if you aren't capable of producing something original, it's probably best to go with this.
So I'd say it's a safe way to make an acceptable site. But I definitely prefer a site that is well-designed and not this generic stuff that is the trend. I agree, it's a bad signal:noise ratio and it also gives me a bit of an icky corporate vibe. /shrug
I think we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction relatively soon with this type of aesthetic, mainly because it's so transparently inauthentic and sterile. It's almost turned into a parody of itself.
I hate it without realizing how much I hate it, and now that you've pointed it out in such simple, concrete terms I'm not going to be able to stop seeing it everywhere.
Like another commenter said, it's awful: they're visually lifeless and they don't add value in terms of being illustrative of the idea their associated text block is meant to convey, nor do they catch the eye in the first place.
You might as well have a lorem-ipsum cat picture in their place, since it has about the same utility.
What a sad, weak people we must be, to be emotionally destroyed by marketing material. How disappointing for humanity to survive wars famines and plagues only to be done in by insufficiently detailed cartoons.
When major employers have cry closets and we constantly tell people to supplant normal human emotions with pharmaceuticals, I'm going to roll the dice and say the trajectory is decidedly downward. At least, for a short while.
The more and more UI and Illustration are "accessible" and "cheap/free" the more people like me who can produce quality illustrations will have big bucks.
So keep it rolling with Corporate Memphisication.
Do want to say there is quite a spectrum in the quality of free illustrations out there. I personally check out a bit when I see anything that looks like or is in the style of undraw[0].
The best I've found and go back to is ManyPixels -- their free gallery is amazing:
The stuff on the gallery above is free to use, but I always feel a little guilty -- I need to actually pay them for something some day. Their pricing is intense but they put out great work.
I never want to criticize something that someone has made, but I do want to offer an alternative!
I think you'd be SHOCKED how much amazing, completely custom artwork is available out there on sites like Fiverr and Upwork. For $100, you can get something beautiful and not generic... and best of all, support an artist!
(Obviously you can eventually spend significantly more on talented designers, once your project becomes more successful! Design isn't cheap, but it definitely can scale as your needs and wallet do.)
I'm confident there are people out there running scams, but every single artist I've used has done something so custom that it's 100% definitely made by them specifically for me.
They also tend to send sketches beforehand, and most have a very distinct style.
Why someone should go to such lengths in order to make someone money for free? Have companies just become a leech on public with tax evasion and discount and private?
You can give it for free to individuals or place it on behance, and not just up for use for companies, but regardless of the specific site, I feel like it's being frustrating to see companies forgetting the social value of letting currency go around, and always asking for freebies, bailouts, tax discounts, laying off people to hire cheap labour or with lesser rights, I am not sure I am generalising it's just that its become a very huge weight on my productivity, I feel like labour is not valued anymore is not appreciated anymore and the only god has become the profit and dividends, and it's affecting my productivity and ability to trust people I work with, I am at my third job changed within a year and I started 2 weeks ago, and I already see conversation about hiring part of the team in Ukraine cuz its free and am almost going to send a resignation letter, other than unappreciated I am starting to feel dirty every time I am at a company.. I guess my post was just part of a deeper frustration that I am going through at the moment and which I can't see the end of
> other than unappreciated I am starting to feel dirty every time I am at a company..
i left corporate america for that reason, amongst others. started my own business. its great. bonus points i only hire people i can work with and there is no HR or politics to muck things up.
Others enjoy their craft, do it for fun, and make it available to the public in a nice way.
Another reason could be that it also provides advertisement for the person providing the work.
The 'money for free' angle is very strange to me : a lot of things provide value, it's not a bad thing to provide something for free, even if companies can use it as well.
As someone who built a free educational platform - I do it because I want my students to have quality learning without feeding into the $300 textbook industry. I'm funded through my career, so it is a passion project. I wanted to build the thing, so I did. I'm not interested in taking on the responsibilities for making it a profitable company.
So yeah my point was not about private to help other people or kids, it's the freebies toward companies who do stuff for a profit and are paid, and take free stuff, it's a bit less disgusting than restaurants who expect people to tip their staff for wage
Surely you don't do everything for monetary compensation? Maintaining a contact, helping a friend move, having a guest, teaching someone something, people do all sorts of stuff for free. Just because feel like it, inclined to the thing itself, promoting their other work, wanting to make the world a better place. Ruin others' similar efforts, to emerge as a monopoly and excercise larger control[0]. There's plenty of reasons.
I would say that I think you missed the part where I wrote "Why someone should go to such lengths in order to make someone money for free?"
To recap, I would help a friend move, because he is.. well, my friend?
I have a guest... because I invited him and he is not going to take the food I prepared to sell it outside my house?
And you can of course promote your work, people have been doing that since ever, you can do that with also licenses where people can see but not sell
But yeah I think I didn't put enough emphasis at this point on "Why someone should go to such lengths in order to make someone money for free?" where the important idea is "To make someone money"
Yes you're right, I missed that. To be frank, this changes my argument completely. It's also the reason why, when talking about open source, I dislike the MIT and other such permissive licenses, and prefer the GPL world. Because it seems like that the GNU people are on the same side regarding this argument. Even then, this license permits for that making someone else richer scenario, but at least not at the complete expense of the original author.
Here's a tip from a designer and engineer by craft. If you want your website or app to have a great design, then either use high-quality images, icons, illustrations, etc, or don't at all.
This might sound unwarranted, but it's true. Your typography should be great, and so should your media assets. This is what makes up most content on any website.
See this for yourself by visiting Microsoft[0] and Apple[1] websites for example. Compare the quality of their product shots, images, and illustrations, if any. See how it makes or breaks the design of the whole site.
Ofc there's a lot more to design than typography and media assets.
