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Thank you so much for this sweet message and I'll relay your wishes to Katerina! She'll appreciate the food part!

Could argue about categorising all illustrations as same because a Twitter feed said so. As a designer, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want your own work to be dismissed like that, without much thought by anyone with an HN/Twitter/Reddit account. But won't argue on that too.

What I think is really unfair to mention is that unDraw has contributed to the commoditization of illustrations. On the contrary, there have been many many projects available to illustrators just because the initial design/proposal/prototype could be built with that and win over the clients. Project designs that would otherwise use photographs but not illustrations.

Sites like Upwork, Freelancer, etc. existed long before unDraw and you could find creative work there for truly humiliating prices. It's extremely inaccurate to blame unDraw for that.

The fact is that unDraw helped bring attention to illustrators and illustrations, which were called icons even a few years ago, by opening up a discussion and many new projects.

It is completely free.

Basically that's there to protect Katerina's illustrations. The reverse-engineering has been achieved by a bunch of people and that's ok but exploiting the work she put into each design was really frustrating.

It was the easier way to signal what exactly unDraw was back then when it was launched and since SVG images are code, it was much cleaner than writing CC(whatever) for users to understand. It remains that way but it will be much clearer in the new version.

Check again the next few days! :-P

Hi, surprised to see unDraw posted here, as it's been two years since we started it! I'm Aggelos and I handle the product side of unDraw for Katerina who is the illustrator and creator of the project. So glad you like it and I'll do my best to answer your questions.

1) There's no chance of getting blindsided as Katerina started this to share work that was not used in client projects and keeps designing new ones daily since the reception of it has been amazing. In the off chance she gets tired, she'll just stop adding new ones, so no worries there!

2) She adds 2 daily for the past two years, but can't promise she'll keep up the pace during the holidays! If you want to request a specific one, she's pretty open to it on Twitter @ninalimpi. But don't share this! Haha...

3) Having the color change on the fly and offering PNG alongside SVG's, I think it would be redundant to add more options.

Btw, the footer is available in the homepage and is included in the /illustrations page for aesthetic reasons! Haha!

SVG's are practically code and can be easily copy-pasted so MIT is a pretty much suitable choice...

So cool to see this posted here... I coded that, so if you have any bugs or questions, let me know!!! Hope you guys like it! Thought of posting it on Show HN but forgot about it! Thanks for the share!

That would have been a good thought, but when started, we decided to go with the classic approach! Thankfully, this additional friction hasn't had any significant impact to conversions! Anyway, thanks and it's something I'll keep in mind for future versions or projects.

You mean no password? Or to skip the confirmation process?

Haha! I think we do! As instantly as a website can be created wouldn't fit there! But seriously now, instantly refers to the publishing process and not the account creation one. You just fill out your account details, a few important settings and two-three fields and you create a fully functional website that can receive emails, subscribers and can have multiple pages. Sorry if I mislead you!

Sorry about that! Will fix immediately! Thx!

Well done Nadya! I must have forgot that! Embarrassing.. Will fix immediately! Thx!

To be honest you got me! In my mind shipping is the way to go and in the last few days launching is a weird option I almost get dragged into pursuing! Haha... You got the reluctant to charge part completely right and I know you make a great case. Will try to do it the hard way since this is more disappointing and you easily get caught up in a momentary launch fantasy that does not exist! Thank you again for everything!

I think you are right but since it's an immature product, we had to decrease the price significantly.

The goal is somewhere between passive income and becoming something more so maybe that's why the mixed signals. Have to take a look at that, I guess.

I know and we did the math on how free users impact our finances but had to somehow launch it and get attention. What would you suggest? Trials and increased pricing? By the way, thanks for providing your feedback!

The revenue model is simple in this case. For everyone that wants to use a full website (custom domain, analytics, no attribution), a small price is worth it. Adding the notifications on the dashboard is the next step but for now receiving it directly was much easier and instant. I think any grandpa would love to receive contact emails! Haha... By the way you had me worried that it looks like an email catcher website and added a features page. Hope this is a good step but anyway, you are the one to blame!:-P

Oh, I get how boring this is but the decision was to take the boring part out first and allow the users to later focus on the real process! Anyway, noted and I'll try to think of another solution!

Actually it is in full production and the goal is to get feedback so that's why it's completely free. The email needs to be verified as this is the address you'll receive contact messages from your created website, thus the need to be correct. It's not about the value but not to send emails to an incorrect address. I have set it to confirmed so you can proceed.

Sorry, forgot to add examples... http://my-awesome-game.coolgamer.club/ is a demo I created, http://ben-the-exorcist.coolgamer.club/ is a random one a user created... To get the email from Twitter, this is the authorization permissions I had to ask. The need for your email is so you can receive email signups directly there and I wanted to avoid the need to verify your address, so Twitter provided the solution... I think it goes without saying that it won't be posting on your Twitter profile and it won't spam. If you do not trust it, you could revoke access at any moment. But sorry no, there is no other way to sign up, at least for now...

It's just a start but I've coded it completely myself, so thought to show someone! If anyone needs a website for her/his game, it will always be free, or as long I can afford to maintain it and it's pretty much production ready... Your website will be multi-page, responsive, mobile friendly and you can use your own domain...

The favorites/bookmarking part is something we'll implement soon enough. It is actually based on their RSS streams but in the next update we'll add sources that required web scraping and did not have their own personal feeds.

The short summaries come from using the Embed.ly API for now but we'll replace it just by scraping the Open Graph or Twitter card meta tags from the pages directly.

To keep it reliable and clean we decided not to allow users to add their own sources but we'll keep adding new ones regularly and we'll add a form to take suggestions.

To be able to share news directly by pressing the tweet button. Actually it's the basic read-write twitter access but since we implemented the front-end tweet button I just changed the required permissions to read only.

Hey guys,

Would appreciate feedback about this project. The goal is to create a website with feeds from reliable tech news and opinion sources. It's still very early but who would you recommend as a source?

Avoiding scope creep is the hardest part and you are to point it out. That and the non-tech parts are when things get messy, frustrating and in 90% of the occasions a project goes wrong. Great and detailed article of this whole process. Good luck guys.

Simpler and far less pretentious times. At least more innocent and without so much noise. Kevin Rose may be considered controversial by many but still his contribution must be acknowledged. The style seems ridiculous now but used to be in a weird way cool.

Really interesting. Not about wild speculation and crazy theories but actually interesting which is kind of rare. I guess the huge storm would be the most interesting one if true, since it's not been observed at the past. Not at this level, at least.

Keep them safely stored. It will be quite valuable at some point in the future.

In a way yes. It's been for more than a few years though. Many mainstream TV series or movies portray hackers as shady, know-it-all characters that have dark motives. This is just a larger scale depiction of the same stereotype, which is not unjustifiable after the recent attacks. Hacking the PS network and XBOX live, Sony about a movie and celebrities for their naked photos is reasonable to create negative public response. Anonymous were not perceived as a threat by the public because they would never try such cheap publicity attracting stunts.

Continuous learning is the most difficult one. Keeping track of the latest developments and at the same time expanding your already acquired knowledge is almost impossible. But both are important.