Show HN: Editable, royalty-free SVG illustrations | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Editable, royalty-free SVG illustrations

gallery.manypixels.co

295 pointsvinrob9243 comments

Thank you.

Also for those who don't know already, unDraw [1] offers a similar collection.

I don't see a license in the page, and "Use them in a commercial or non-commercial way for your landing pages" unfortunately isn't enough to state the extent for their copyright use.

SVG is a really cool format since you can easily change the colors of certain elements with your SVG editor to make them unique. This website even has a color selector next to the search field for choosing the root color.

I feel like the design service is muddled with this, so agreed. I imagine this is more of a promotional tool to get people to know about the company - and that's fine - but if you're going to put it out there be clear how people can use it

Thanks for the colour selector tip; not doing a search, I would have missed that it updates all pictures instantly. A very nice feature.

Just updated our gallery with our license -> https://gallery.manypixels.co/license

Isn't this just public domain? Why not use an existing license like Creative Common Zero if that's what you're going for.

Edit: Never mind. I saw the compilation term.

> […] More precisely, ManyPixels grants you an nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use the assets provided from ManyPixels for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the creator or ManyPixels. This license does not include the right to compile assets, vectors or images from ManyPixels to replicate a similar or competing service, in any form or sell the assets in packs. […]

I don’t understand the license [1]: how can it prohibits me to e.g. compile assets to resell them and at the same time allow me to do whatever I want without asking permission from ManyPixels?

[1]: https://gallery.manypixels.co/license

Because that’s the terms of the license. You can use it as long as you don’t commercially profit from the freebie. More than reasonable to me.

> without permission from or attributing the creator or ManyPixels

So as one "work" publish the items with a less restrictive license. And as a second "work" publish your compilation of the first work.

I recently saw someone compile together ALL of the unDraw illustrations and sell them as a bundle on one of Envato's marketplaces. I think this license implies that this kind of behavior isn't okay, and rightfully so.

Common license now for freebies: https://unsplash.com/license

I don't think many people understand open licenses very well. I project that I follow that has been active for years releases under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, but think they can prohibit people from using their assets from receiving donations for things made with them...

To my eyes, it’s not quite clear if these are free or not. Royalty free in some cases might mean pay one time and then not any more for future applications. Are they free?

There's another link to undraw but are there any more places to find stuff like this? Paid or free? I was recently looking for an svg shape library purely for decoration but couldn't find anything.

https://www.flaticon.com/, maybe?

There's always Openclipart: https://openclipart.org/

The downside is, of course, the wildly varying style and quality, which means that finding the good images can require sifting through lower-quality content. But at least to me, that's often more useful than a comparatively tiny selection of consistently high quality art which probably just isn't going to have what I'm looking for. They also are using straightforward CC0 terms, which is always a plus compared to custom licenses.

Notices "Please use modern navigator" everywhere instead of pictures.

Should be "Please use not-so-modern, with privacy features disabled, ready to consume ads user-hostile browser"

Firefox with content-blocking enabled works fine. Not sure what you mean.

The site uses XHR to pull from media.graphcms.com in order to display the images. When this fails it instead displays the message "please use modern navigator" in place of each image. For me, uMatrix was blocking the requests.

Great example of where you don’t need xhr

I really like these SVG graphics. Thank you :)

I think these illustrations are very nice, but they might have too much "identity" to be generally applicable.

They are editable, so you can fix that. I do think they hit an odd middle ground of being too complex to use in apps, yet too simple to use in content. But they are free, so I'm appreciative of the work that went into it, even if I don't personally have a use for them.

"Please use modern navigator" : I don't need to be insulted when visiting a website.

Are you saying the browser you use is such a part of your personal identity that you feel personally insulted when people talk about it negatively?

Why do you feel that way?

Because last version of firefox doesn't deserve this message. I have become suspicious of all message of this sort with time, I feel they are purely dishonest 95% of the time, and dishonesty is insulting.

Have no problems with latest version of Firefox on MAC, are you using windows ?

It's probably because of adblock or something like that but there is so many ways to frame it correctly like "cannot load image".

uBlock Origin doesn't trigger that. Latest Firefox, too.

uMatrix does, it loads (presumably) the SVG data from media.graphcms.com

The cause of the error is not the problem, it's the way to report the error that is problematic. But if you really want to know, it was umatrix that was blocking third party "media.graphcms.com"

Perhaps the message should be "please use an adblocker with a better blocklist"

Working on ff mobile for me

Framed as old is not an insult, people love vintage cars :)

It’s funny because “navigator” sounds like an old fashioned term for browser. Please use a modern horseless carriage.

It wouldn’t hurt to add some cultural diversity to the characters.

I know they’re editable so “I could do it”, but I think it would enhance the main landing page to show some examples... as well as make it more inclusive for the audience.

What culture do the images depict?

What are the differences and advantage over https://openclipart.org/ ?

They seem to be much higher quality. I can’t imagine putting anything from openclipart on a product landing page.

First of all, the website looks good and the illustrations (final product) are nice, but a couple of things put me off a bit:

First, the chatbot at the bottom right. I know it's common to many websites, and perhaps there are stats that show they help conversion, but I find it very annoying. If I need something, I can click on the chat button: you don't need to already start a chat with me and use up real estate for a chat that I haven't requested, and require 2 clicks from me to close it (the first click just opens up a bigger overlay, and the second click minimizes it to the state I wanted it to be to begin with). Also I know that it's an automated greeting and nothing personal, so it feels like an ad, disguised as a personal interaction.

Second, any business proposition where I am offered "unlimited" anything where I know that real human work (not automated) is required, or that limited resources (bandwidth, storage, etc) will have to be shared in order to satisfy my needs tells me that it is not sustainable from the provider side (business-wise) and that the only way it will actually work is if the service to me gets degraded so that it can handle the load from all the other customers.

Perhaps consider the level of service that you can really offer and state it clearly in the plans. If I see "10 requests" monthly it will signal to me that you've done your homework to figure out what the right number is so that your business can support me appropriately at that level, but if you say you can handle an unlimited amount of work from me for a fixed fee, it gives me the feeling that you haven't done your homework, and that our relationship is going to be difficult at some point.

Another vague commitment is to "get an update on your task/order within one business day" - which I can interpret, if my experience with other services serves, that I will get an email with a confused one liner every day until we finally converge on what I really need after half a dozen emails that used up 6 days of "service". I have dealt with parties that offered 24h turnaround support/updates/modifications only to find out that their response, perhaps due to workload stress, was not helpful and required another interaction from me: it creates an artificial throttling system that is most annoying to customers that want stuff to get done.

Solutions?

Consider a pay-per-use model. You can always do volume discounts and even a fixed monthly fee to access a discounted price per if you want to address bigger customers. You can also provide N free interactions for new customers if you want to showcase your work.

What I as customer want is to see a business model where your incentives and my incentives are aligned to get each piece of work out of the pipeline as soon as possible. This should be a common goal for both parties: you want the job to be done so you can make money on another one, and I want the job to be done for obvious reasons. Any business interaction where I will be in a position of needing to push at a throttled rate tells me the incentives to get my work done aren't shared, and that worries me.

Good luck!

As a counter argument with regard to chat widgets on websites. I personally find them quite helpful.

Note that I didn't say they weren't helpful. I was just being put off by the initial "open" state. I don't have an issue with having an icon I can click on to "chat with a person".

Hi Magnetic. Quentin here, one of the co-founder of ManyPixels. Many thanks for your comment, super useful insights.

We have already jungled around of idea of moving to some kind of pay-per-use system while still keeping this a subscription model and will make sure to experiment this in the future.

$XX/mo for 10 tasks would be a solution pr $XX/mo for 100 credits (1 landing page = 3 credits, logo = 2 credits) are 2 options that we would like to consider later down the line.

Thanks a lot !

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