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Ask HN: Where do you get illustrations for your site?

17 points by cageypancakes ↗ HN
For those that have created a website for your project/startup or created a webapp with graphics, where do you normally get the illustrations? Do you guys hire designers, use free illustration libraries etc? Just wondering about the norm.

11 comments

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muzani
I've had good experience hiring designers. Designers seem very much underpaid for the amount of expertise they have, so you'll often get some good deals if you look hard enough. I've had an argument with one designer that I wanted to pay her X amount hourly, and she wanted that much daily.

Still, it's something like $80 for something that takes me a week to do and tweak, and some experienced dude can get it done in 1-2 hours.

But for photography, I often do it myself. Photographers here are often overpriced, as in you could end up paying hundreds of dollars for similar quality as you'd get for half an hour and a good phone camera. The people who are passionate about it often do it part time, and the people who do it for a living often focus on improving negotiation skills. YMMV.

If you're doing something with game art, there are places like https://itch.io/game-assets

Envato has some good quality stuff too: https://elements.envato.com/

cageypancakes
I feel like many people underestimate the power of good UX/UI which causes designers (especially freelancers) to be underpaid. Those resources look interesting! I notice many of them are fixed graphics which might be a bit inflexible. For those looking for some more customizable scenes there are libraries like: https://www.drawkit.io/ https://www.humaaans.com/
muzani
Just UI alone is underestimated. I have consulted for years. I find that the client's budget and deadline depends almost entirely on the design proposed. One client was 'running low on budget' and after bringing in a designer, he tripled the original budget.

Sometimes not just illustrations, but things like fonts and whitespace matter a lot, and it takes experience to see that you're doing it wrong.

thijsvandien
What is your process to find the right people to hire?
muzani
1. I establish a benchmark, usually me or whoever is doing the design. It would take me, say, a week to tweak a logo? If I can hire someone to do it in same time, at the same price, at higher quality, that's a win. You get what you pay for, so you want to set a decent budget.

2. I can put up a post requesting help with something, and a budget. Define clearly what I want. Usually, there's 20 or so applicants, half of whom are great.

3. Anyone who's hiring someone else to draw, filter them first. They're usually really low quality, fail to meet deadlines, and cheap.

4. Ask for a portfolio of work. It doesn't have to be great, but match my styles. Be tolerant of mistakes. If the person has several different work that looks exactly the same, filter them out too. Watch for plagiarism too - if you hire someone to draw you a logo of a pizza shop and the results are very similar to a Google search for "pizza logo", don't hire.

5. Filter it down some more. Don't hire someone who can't understand what the goal is; a good test is to have them repeat what you said in their own words. Don't hire anyone obviously lazy. Some have a pre-written questionnaire for clients - this is good.

6. You'll probably have a few choices remaining. This is a good place to negotiate, or just take what you have if it's down to one person. Don't haggle hard; you don't want them to be demotivated. In some situations (e.g. web designers), you might even want to propose more than what they offered, based on your budget.

fludlight
Last few projects of mine:

- Prototyping: no graphics (text only); drew myself (so bad that I reverted to text only); free libraries

- Publicly available: paid a friend of a friend; hired someone on a popular outsourcing site (after I paid them it turned out that they stole it from a not-free illustration library); free library; paid for not-free library

- very limited (<50 users) beta: all of the above plus not-free-library with watermarks (users actually liked this because it gave the site an authentic, work-in-progress, exclusive vibe--their words)

Honestly, graphics are overrated and people of all walks of life appreciate high-information density above all else. Landing pages for marketing campaigns convert slightly better with fancy graphics, so you ideally want both. Most companies only have the pretty pictures, which is both a shame and an opportunity.

cageypancakes
I think good graphics can create a feeling of authenticity so I'm pretty surprised to hear that the watermarks gave that same effect.

High information density works better depending on the context for sure, but in other cases illustrations add to the "human" factor to a brand/site to make it seem more inviting or personal.

Overall, I think the trend has definitely shifted to more of a focus on visual design for clearer communication

ddri
Working on a little side project using GAN AI as a method of illustration generation.

Especially interested in the context of the current "abstract human" sketch style. Expecting this will be inevitable within 12 to 24 months, and it's just a side project to help frame learning GAN, but it's bubbling along.

Designers will resist the first examples of these kinds of services, but it's really the marketing managers that will see them rise to prominence.

Being able to load a company style guide, and connect a repo of approved assets/components, and click to generate content in the context of the output requirements? It's simply going to exist. And designers will do what they (we) always do, and that is use the available tools to give more controlled nuance and meaning to the content across.

TL;DR... hiring designers to do this manually for now, and thinking how we enable everyone at scale (the next step beyond "just use Canva" which doesn't help the time-poor marketing teams).