Show HN: Free and open-source illustrations for your projects

That is a very nice way to phrase "our way or the highway" I think.

It's almost like those people want lemmy to succeed.

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.

Here's his updated website: https://ekfos.com

Can recommend 100%

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.

Super glad you like it!

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.

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 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!

As with all probably-net-positive-progress, though, some losses are both necessary and worth lamenting.

> 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.

They also tend to send sketches beforehand, and most have a very distinct style.

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"