Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste (svgbackgrounds.com)
399 points by visiwig 16 days ago | 66 comments



wackget 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
BoppreH 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

echoangle 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
BoppreH 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

> 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

visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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

lrr15 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Good catch on the UX — defaulting to the midpoint or showing a brief animation on load would make the interactive part self-evident without users having to discover it.
hju22_-3 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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?
andai 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

You have access. Enjoy!

Edit: upon further investigation, access isn't something that's just thrown around willy nilly! It usually goes for $120/yr!

hhart 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

So "you have access" means "you're not currently paying."
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
jjwiseman 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
visiwig 15 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
dirkc 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
visiwig 15 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

These are beautiful, thank you for sharing. I really like the one with the triangles, was it inspired by Rule 30?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30

visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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!
peterkov 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Rule 30 is cellular automaton — the triangles here look more like a manually tiled geometric repeat. Has anyone actually compared them structurally? They feel quite different on close inspection.
gerdesj 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Not one of these efforts emulate <blink />. I want my money back.
karlshea 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

You're welcome. Glad you found something useful!

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?

visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Each one can be copied as inline SVG or CSS using the background-image property with a data URI. Most are under 1KB.
democracy 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

it's great work man - been using your backgrounds for long long time now!
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Much appreciated, always nice to hear that :)
aerhardt 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

This is very cool but hasn’t it been around for like a decade?
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Good memory. I launched in 2018 (8 years ago) and have been adding more graphics over the years -- doubling this specific collection / freebies.
Theodores 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
Theodores 14 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Have you tried the Jetbrains tools? The free one - WebStorm - comes with live preview.

Nowadays I put my SVG for icons in CSS as pseudocode elements. This means you can't 'use' or 'currentColor', but I am okay with that for icons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lea_Verou

Lea Verou got me started on this particular technique, the gotcha is that you have to escape the hash characters with %023. Her presentations can be found on Youtube, and Lea also has a fab website.

dormento 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

This rocks. Thank you!
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Glad you think so, you're welcome, enjoy!
ksymph 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

ksymph 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Whoopsie, thanks

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!
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
cold_gate 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

SVG served as static files is rock solid. The moment someone decides to generate these dynamically at request time, that's when I get paged at 3am.
shellerik 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

FYI - the previews do not work if you have the Dark Reader plugin enabled in your browser.
rcarmo 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

These are pretty nice, congrats
visiwig 15 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Thank you!
thekevan 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

This is top notch, great work!
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Hey thanks!

Great idea man, must be pulling in some good SEO traffic as well.
Frannky 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Yes, I was lucky enough to find a keyword domain that was available. Would recommend :)

What's the license?
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

Ashkaan 14 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Fantastic!
termwatch 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

i did not know that i needed this until now
visiwig 15 days ago | flag as AI [–]

cool, hope you find something useful!
lakpahana 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

comments ...
Frannky 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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
j45 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

lukan 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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?

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.
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Hey thanks, I didn't pay for bots, unsure how to prove that though.

I wish I was able to be excited over svg backgrounds. How different life would be..

Your behavior makes HN worse the same way AI bots do it
mikodin 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Unclear but I will say upon opening the site I was sparked with joy and excitement to use them
Frannky 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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
strata32 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Minor pedantry: these aren't really "backgrounds" in the CSS sense -- they're patterns. Though I suppose "48 free SVG patterns" doesn't have the same ring to it.
visiwig 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Glad I shared at the right time :)
tclancy 16 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Tell me more.