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Comment by carrolldunham | Hacker News Reader

The deformed, grotesque, inflated humanoids they use in flat design are opposite to 'kawaii', and opposite in motivation. Instead of hitting your instincts with a supernormal cuteness/sweetness stimulus, it's supposed to desensitise you to 'differences' in humans. It's ideologically tinged

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I dunno about that. Kawaii characters are all the above: large heads, large eyes and if female “glamour” to top it off.

So it's the exact opposite of what's trending in western webdesign illustration now.

Yeah, I'm wondering from time to time, what's going on with the strange cult of the small head. I've seen that illustrators call this trend 'big limbs', but I call it 'small head'. As in 'Let's not focus on this big head of yours, shrink your head, just go with the flow'. Get rid of your brain, your thoughts, your personality, everyone is OK. Looks like it's the millenial's equivalent of the boomers' large nose cartoony characters (or maybe a shitty pastel family-friendly castrated version of Robert Crumb's body fantasies) and it will pass. However, I think this one's still in its prime time and gonna keep pissing me off for quite a long time. Maybe I should try harder to propagate the style I enjoy- giant head, no body, tiny limbs.

It seems that a good chunk of the web design community went bananas on Humaaans[0], probably because Facebook started using similar small-headed, monstrous-limbed, absurdly deformed human caricatures. I absolutely abhore this trend, and feel the same way you do: it deemphasizes what's truly unique about humans - our brains, our minds, our personalities.

[0] - https://www.humaaans.com/

Cool to see someone that shares my view. Of course it's not all black and white. There are some illustrators who have established a name for themselves, like Karol Banach. People like him incorporate this template for human proportions into their trademark style, but the body elements are neatly composed into a larger picture. It's mostly mimicking 20th century fine painting styles. Decidedly more Picasso than Matisse. And then there are all those poor schmucks pumping out commodity illustration. Aside from Humaans, I think I've also seen some official guidelines for Illustration by Facebook. This is sad. This is how the Internet got corporate. Also, there's this thing to make process faster for the more ambitious ones: https://galshir.com/posea

That's an interesting app, thanks! I'm actually looking for tools for generating properly-sized vector human figures, or even doing skeletal animation on vector graphics.

Speaking of art style of human figures on the web, my favourite one is https://undraw.co/illustrations. These are the kind of images I'd like to see more on the web, instead of Humaaans lookalikes.

The way these things tend to go is more that some illustrator does something a little different, others see it and like it, it spreads, and it’s now the new mainstream, until it all repeats again.

The ideological bent you choose to read into it is... interesting.

FWIW “large heads tiny limbs” has been a thing many times in the history of art, look at eg late 1800s caricatures

Your comment ends at your claim but you do not provide any sources, evidence, or reasoning.

> it's supposed to desensitise you to 'differences' in humans.

Why did you put differences in quotes? Do you mean something else than just differences?

He's offended by the fact that they're not all white. It's the real reason why people are acting like they're outraged by vector drawings of people: some of them happen to be brown.

Where are you reading that?

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