Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste
svgbackgrounds.com365 points by visiwig a day ago
365 points by visiwig a day ago
These are great. Please consider adding a visible <textarea> with the CSS instead of relying on "click to copy" buttons. For security reasons, some users/browsers disable access to the clipboard which means there's no fallback way to copy the CSS.
Solid point, I used to do this, and it wouldn't be hard to go back or add a show code button so users can copy the CSS as text.
Those are excellent! The orange shingles are my favorite. Though I think some of them are not working on Firefox; the blue and green vortices are rendered as a single blue rectangle and a single green hexagon.
I wonder how people are using them in a way that is not distracting to the main content. I've found that high-frequency patterns (small details with sharp transitions) can be a bit distracting, but I haven't found a good solution that doesn't compromise the beauty of the backgrounds.
I think it’s kind of common to have the background for the whole document and then have an overlay with a solid color (and maybe less-than-100% opacity if you’re daring) on which the main content with all the text is shown. This works best for browser that are full screen on PC screens of course where you want to limit text width anyways. On mobile or narrow windows, you don’t have a lot of space to show the background.
Thanks. I'm already doing something similar, but I feel like the background that is visible on the sides is still somewhat distracting. Might be my imagination though.
I think that keeping it fixed on scrolling and giving it low saturation should be enough to keep them from being distracting. And obviously, no animations, although a really slow one might work.
> Though I think some of them are not working on Firefox; the blue and green vortices are rendered as a single blue rectangle and a single green hexagon.
Move the sliders
I took a look at FireFox and I think it's working, but not obvious that you need to slide the top range slider for the full effect. It would look better if I reversed the effect, I'll have to rethink that.
firefox (148.0.2) on linux, the preview for me is not working
tried them on chrome, it works fine, nice work
I like your interface for switching between the backgrounds and having a small panel to tweak the parameters. I played around with procedural patterns using SVG/canvas/webgl a while back and this makes me feel like re-packaging the way it's represented.
Thanks, I've designed a few UIs for manipulating graphics and spent a few tries iterating and improving this one in particular. There was a need to show as much background as possible, sometimes the limitations lead to some creative choices. I'm quite pleased how it came out myself.
The notice about having "access" to the backgrounds is sticky, and takes up one third of the screen on mobile with no way to remove it . . . Why?
Fair point. Once you click a thumb to preview the button, it becomes the UI to manipulate the backgrounds. I'll take a look and rethink the setup.
I find it odd that there's a custom of blurring or obscuring exactly the thing I'm interested in when I show interest in it by mousing over it.
Fair, I was fine going this direction because you're a click a way from get the full view and with the hover there isn't much more "preview" to show. My number one priority with the hover was making it obvious the given thumb is interactive.
Not one of these efforts emulate <blink />. I want my money back.
These are beautiful, thank you for sharing. I really like the one with the triangles, was it inspired by Rule 30?
No I've never heard about Rule 30, I would have been nervous to click that link if it wasn't leading to a Wikipedia article, phew, but the concept is quite cool and inspiring. Thanks for sharing that with me!
Hey thanks so much! I actually found your site a bit over a year ago while I was redoing my portfolio and used one for my header.
These are awesome! I’d love to use some of these for my solitaire game.
Weird thing when I preview one of the backgrounds then scroll down the page on mobile the images disappear. I have to refresh the page to view all the backgrounds again after selecting one.
I wonder if you should add names for the patterns so we can pick favorites?
Hmmm, that doesn't sound right. Do you mind reaching out to me via the contact form and dropping any more details such as device/browser? BTW, each background does have name, but I hide that on mobile since real estate is limited.
Each one can be copied as inline SVG or CSS using the background-image property with a data URI. Most are under 1KB.
FYI - the previews do not work if you have the Dark Reader plugin enabled in your browser.
it's great work man - been using your backgrounds for long long time now!
Hmm, the parabolic ones seem to be broken? Both on FF and Chromium, they just display as an outline of a single shape on a black background.
> Hmm, the parabolic ones seem to be broken? Both on FF and Chromium, they just display as an outline of a single shape on a black background.
Move the sliders.
This is very cool but hasn’t it been around for like a decade?
Good memory. I launched in 2018 (8 years ago) and have been adding more graphics over the years -- doubling this specific collection / freebies.
This rocks. Thank you!
I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, but I'm usually disappointed after clicking the link. These on the other hand are excellent, and that they have configurable options like stroke, color, etc is gravy on the top. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the kind words! I've played around a lot with SVG and love how you can change various attributes to achieve cool effects.
i did not know that i needed this until now
Great idea man, must be pulling in some good SEO traffic as well.
Like this user has a comment history of hyping show HN
I mean isn't that what show HN is for? Plus wasn't just hype, I was generally interested in getting more info on the SEO side of this project.
I've had a lot of nice people try out my own projects and leave comments in the past and it meant a lot to me so I'm just trying to pass that forward.
this matches my experience exactly
What's the license?
The license can be found here: svgbackgrounds.com/license
Summary: You can use graphics in personal or commercial projects, you cannot use the graphics as the primary integrity of your product, you must provide attribution (svgbackgrounds.com/attribution)
And before anyone rips off my head, attribution can be placed inside commented out code, so it doesn't need to take away from your design.
comments ...
this is exactly what i needed
What is your authoring tool for SVG?
The SVG code is well written. It is neither Adobe bloat-spam-slop and neither is it overly SVGOMG'd.
For picky SVG people you could have some easy way to present the code. Only a minority value quality SVG, artworkers do not look at SVG code and coders just see SVG as 'assets' from the artworker. SVG therefore has not evolved to a full art form.
Hey great eye. I generally design in Illustrator with a plugin by Astute graphics that allows me to reduce unnecessary anchor points, run the exported SVG through SVGOMG, and then spend solid time hand coding each background in VS Code with the SVG extension by Jock that let's me see a live preview. Then on the actual site the customizer script I wrote will catch some attributes that aren't needed and remove them, but it's far from perfect.
I am very confused by the comments, they seem too excited for this... Are they real or paid bots? If they are real, kudos to OP
They all seem to come from quite old HN profiles, though. So if someone managed to overtake old HN accounts for manipulation .. I would assume it would be for a more lucrative target?
I wish I was able to be excited over svg backgrounds. How different life would be..
There’s likely folks who discovered to that svgs could do many amazing things, except the tooling didn’t seem to be readily available.
Now when I see someone build something working with SVG, I check it out to see how it might compare to another way of doing it.
This one is quite good. The author is known, here fielding questions, and the project is like ten years old. If there are bots, I really don’t think they’re coordinated in any way with the OP, only coordinated in the usual “spam HN to get karma” sort of way.
Your behavior makes HN worse the same way AI bots do it
If there’s a scale of “making HN worse,” I’m not sure genuine human skepticism is on it. LLM generated walls of text and garbage Show HN posts sure are at the top though!
Unclear but I will say upon opening the site I was sparked with joy and excitement to use them
It may also be that I am just comment AI paranoid, but yeah, I find myself a lot guessing if there's a person behind a comment or not
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