Show HN: Free and open-source illustrations for your projects
Sorry to be a Scrooge, but I wish people would stop doing this. It&#x27;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&#x27;s no reason to compensate people for it.<p>There&#x27;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 &#x27;paying&#x27; with your privacy, which is very different from what I&#x27;m addressing here, I think the basic idea of value still applies. It&#x27;s important to pay for shit sometimes. Forget the ethics of supporting your peers and just think about how it&#x27;ll get you better quality, custom work.<p>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&#x27;s an unfair read, but I can&#x27;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.<p>On a particularly bad day, I can&#x27;t help but feel like this kind of project is leading toward the centralization of art as a whole. It&#x27;s undeniably stagnating commercial artistry.<p>Sincerely,<p>Someone who is still butthurt about Squarespace, et al. killing off small and solo web design&#x2F;dev shops.