The Rise of Illustration Generators
Over the last few years I have noticed websites offering Illustration packs in mostly flat, hand drawn / doodle and colorful styles celebrating diversity. I thought it worth mentioning here.
by Pau Barbaro
I think in some cases they could be useful or used as inspiration. When I used to make websites I was always on the lookout for free icon sets. What with the current situation in the world not everyone will have the budget to commission an Illustrator for such things, so these could be useful. I know some people look down on clip art but it has its uses.
I was going to research and collect links for these but I found someone has already done this here which saves me time. I hope they don’t mind me linking to them here.
For Illustrators who want to market themselves to clients needing this sort of thing, making image packs could be a useful strategy. It is also worth being aware of this sort of thing because it means there is less opportunity to get paid for doing these sort of Illustrations if they are freely available unless you are offering something more unique or tailored.
Another website I found is called Designstripe. This offers customizable flat style Illustrations for a variety of uses across lifestyle, collaboration, online education, blogging and business related subjects with free and paid options. The results are very generic.
I’ve also noticed a trend in the creation of 3D icons for designers lately.
3dIcones: Open source 3D icons for designers
With Adobe incorporating more accessible 3D features into its design software, the growing popularity of Blender and the ability to use 3D in an online design tool called Figma, this is something to keep an eye on.
Microsoft 365 Fluent Emojis
You can read more about the now open source library of fluent emoji designs here. They are available on Github and Figma.
I was wishing I could just drop a 3D object into Affinity a few weeks ago but it can’t do that, so I might explore how to do this with Clip Studio in a future article.
