https://twitter.com/humansofflat
Here's my favorite recent offender:
https://twitter.com/HumansOfFlat/status/1184867036679327744?...
As an aside, I really don't understand the other people in this thread linking to competitors. It feels a bit rude on a Show HN.
"Here is all this hard work I did" "Great, I love X competitor"
I had this issue coming up a lot when I was doing more graphic design projects. Never really understand why small clients really wanted to look like everyone else. I always thought the aproach should be the oposite, the lower the budget the bolder you must be if you want anyone to remember you.
That being said I expect that people outside the tech-space wouldn’t be exposed to such designs often and would find then as lovely as I am :).
Have I misread the sentiment?
When I need an image, illustration, or icon I need it to be one or more of the following:
1. Accurate
The image or illustration depicts a real thing or process I care about and it needs to show that clearly. It's unlikely that stock photos and illustrations will meet that bar. Unless the rest of my content is about a well known or generic topic my imagery is not going to be widely available or generic.
2. On brand
If I'm adding visual interest, color, flare, whathaveyou to a page and the exact content doesn't matter, then the styling and emotional tone do. More specifically they need to be coherent across my entire site/presentation/product. In addition this content needs to be helpful to a viewer to remember my specific property. My brand can only be diluted by using assets which are common, off-tone, or not fully integrated with a recognizable and memorable look and feel.
3. Repeatable
For any media I create and want to maintain I have to think about how hard it's going to be to change it in the future. If I find a great image or icon or illustration I need to know that if I need the source modified or reproduced with a slight variation I can do that. In practice, that usually means having continued access to the artist who produced the asset. Their style will come through in any project and maintain the coherence over time that allows for iterative rather than drastic change.
Convey information, build a brand, build a repeatable process. Stock feels like a self-defeating trap. Sure it looks nice, and for arts sake it can be desirable, but for any business or professional communication purpose it seems to entirely miss the point of having media in the first place.
For instance, commissioning a custom icon set rather than picking one off-the-shelf is a luxury only some projects will have access to.
Additionally, oftentimes stock assets function as good placeholders until a larger budget comes into play. Suppose you are working on a video game and waiting for environmental assets to be complete; in the meantime, a sample texture may do.
In a perfect world, perhaps every font, icon, illustration, photo, or texture would be bespoke to its exact application. In the mean time, we have stock assets.
It reminds me of Ikea instructions, which are meant to purely convey the procedure of assembling furniture with no emotion. But when you're describing your business you want to evoke emotion right?
Ironically, these cartoonish Flat-Humaans convey no human emotions at all. They feel like a wall of propaganda of what the company is telling you how the product/service will function (much like war propaganda)...
Can you share how the business model for this sort of site works? I’ve seen a ton of this style (Unsplash, etc.) and always assumes it’s based on AdSense or similar.
Is that the case here?
Unsplash is a bit different, all of the images are completely free. From my knowledge, this was originally used as a marketing funnel for their parent company, Crew. Crew has since been acquired and Unsplash has spun in to it's own entity. Nowadays my hunch is that they are monetizing through calls to their API (Unsplash is integrated into big players like Squarespace, Trello, Medium). Feel free to fact check as I am no expert when it comes to Unsplash's business model.
If you want illustrations that add value to your business, how can you hire the illustrator or designer to do a custom job? It is not clear if the site lets you do this—which would be great.
