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Show IH: www.blendful.com — Create, remix, and sell illustrations online.

Hi IH, I'm Nikk and I'm an IndieHacker who just created Blendful, www.blendful.com. I'm a designer/programmer and I realized how frustrating it is for people who are not designers to create high quality illustrations that fit well with their project. Blendful is intended to fill

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    Beautiful site, hope you can solve the chicken and egg problem.

    Tested the editor works great.

    Also please add a scroll bar :)

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      Also. I think the chicken and egg problem is interesting; but I can illustrate and I don't mind just spending endless numbers of hours in front of the computer creating illustrations to satisfy the search queries we're getting. Maybe I am naive in thinking that using my own illustrations as the initial "seed" may be enough to get the ball rolling. Would be interested to hear what other companies have done to make this happen; I know marketplaces are notoriously difficult to launch because of this issue, but if I can provide all of the supply-side pull to satisfy the demand—before real supply-demand equilibrium exists on the site; well, maybe that will be enough. It will be interesting to see!

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        Doing it yourself is one solution.

        Might be worth setting up a short term agency that sells illustrations to other design/development agencies and then outsource the illustrations but maintain good quality.

        Might be worth building in a way external users can sell packs https://www.drawkit.io/

        Also FAQ on how the sites works would be nice.

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          Wow Drawkit looks awesome. I should reach out to them :) thanks for showing me. Awesome ideas; I will definitely go in that direction. Really really appreciate this advice, exactly what I'm looking for and infinitely helpful. Thank you!

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      Thank you! Scroll bar to which part of the site?

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          That's interesting how some UA's hide it and others don't. Thank you, I will try to fix that!

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    I love this idea! I'm curious about the "request a design" flow. Am I paying for an exclusive design for myself or would anyone be able to use the composable parts/design? It could be cool for a sort of "bounty program" to be in place where multiple people could contribute toward getting a new package funded for the community.

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      Thank you so much! Hi! I think eventually we would add an option for both having the design be exclusive (for which the user would pay more) and non-exclusive if they don't mind others having access to the design components.

      I really like the bounty program idea—it will be interested to think about how to integrate that. I will try it! We're iterating fast so expect to see something soon. Thanks! :))

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    Good idea, good design. You are a lucky person that have both skills though :)

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      Oh man, guess I could second @triangle that it's not luck. I've worked on building products like these maybe 12 hours a day for the last decade. The first ones were totally abhorrent, (totally unintelligible code, designs that would make an average kindergartener look like Picasso) and they've just slowly been improving. It's been a labor of love :)

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    Hey Nikk, your site looks really good and im impressed by the seemless workflow in the Editor. Did you bild that Plattform on top of a lowcode Environment or do you have your own techstack? Did you built the Editor all by your own or is this logic provided by a Framework? :)
    Thanks for sharing!!

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      Hey thomas! Nope.. I built the whole thing from scratch.. Lots of playing with SVG! Just pushed some updates, check em out! :)

      Thank you!

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    This is great, well done.

    • Would be good to be able to put in hex codes of colours rather than having to try and match by eye. (undraw.co does this well)
    • Wasn't sure what format to upload assets in for them to be editable? Doesn't really explain that anywhere I could see.
    • Needs an undo button or shortcut
    • Really great design, and it's really useful.
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      Hi Trike! Thank you so much for visiting and the great feedback :)

      You're right about the HEX. I've put that off for a while since we're essentially hue based but I think I could figure out a way to make HEX values more intuitive. I'll make sure that's implemented this week.
      You're also right that file format is ambiguous. For reference it's currently SVG only, but I'll definitely make sure that's more obvious.
      Undo functionality is actually kind of hard so probably going to save that for when I get it out of MVP status, but thanks for keeping me accountable on it.

      Thank you so much!! Really really appreciate the comment.

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        No problem, its really great, you've done and amazing job.
        One more thing, when I went to search for an asset I searched for 'tree' nothing came up, I clicked on 'featured' and found a tree. The asset was called tree and was tagged tree but didn't appear when I searched.

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          That's interesting! I just ran a query and can't find anything tagged "tree".. will look into it and make sure there aren't any bugs... Thanks so much! :)

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            OK sorry, might not be tagged, maybe make the search look for title as well then. Good luck with it all.

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              Thanks so much Trike. Would love if you kept in touch.

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      Looks like you're a fan of your own work, nice! :D

      I like it!

      On the homepage, it says 'create' or 'sell' your art. How does one go about 'using' it?

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        Hi Rosieherry, thanks so much for the comment!! And yeah, gotta be your own advocate! :) Can you let me know what part you find confusing? It may help me build a better experience. Thanks :)

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          So, I guess what was going on in my head is that landing on that page I personally wouldn't create or sell art (it's not my skill set), but I would be interested in buying. It wasn't clear to me how I would go about that or what that process/service looks like.

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            This is ultra useful, thank you!

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