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Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste

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.

15 hours agowackget

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

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.

18 hours agoBoppreH

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.

18 hours agoechoangle

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.

18 hours agoBoppreH

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.

3 hours agodietr1ch

> 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

12 hours agolelanthran

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

firefox (148.0.2) on linux, the preview for me is not working

tried them on chrome, it works fine, nice work

3 hours agosickmartian

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.

6 hours agodirkc

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.

an hour agovisiwig

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?

20 hours agohju22_-3

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!

18 hours agoandai

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

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.

17 hours agojjwiseman

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.

an hour agovisiwig

Not one of these efforts emulate <blink />. I want my money back.

17 hours agogerdesj

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

20 hours agothrowaway2046

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!

12 hours agovisiwig

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.

14 hours agokarlshea

You're welcome. Glad you found something useful!

12 hours agovisiwig

FYI - the previews do not work if you have the Dark Reader plugin enabled in your browser.

3 hours agoshellerik

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?

17 hours agoyesthisiswes

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

Each one can be copied as inline SVG or CSS using the background-image property with a data URI. Most are under 1KB.

a day agovisiwig

it's great work man - been using your backgrounds for long long time now!

16 hours agodemocracy

Much appreciated, always nice to hear that :)

12 hours agovisiwig

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.

12 hours agoksymph

> 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.

12 hours agolelanthran

Whoopsie, thanks

3 hours agoksymph

These are pretty nice, congrats

9 hours agorcarmo

Thank you!

2 hours agovisiwig

This is very cool but hasn’t it been around for like a decade?

20 hours agoaerhardt

Good memory. I launched in 2018 (8 years ago) and have been adding more graphics over the years -- doubling this specific collection / freebies.

13 hours agovisiwig

This rocks. Thank you!

a day agodormento

Glad you think so, you're welcome, enjoy!

a day agovisiwig

i did not know that i needed this until now

4 hours agotermwatch

cool, hope you find something useful!

an hour agovisiwig

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!

19 hours agopseudosavant

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

This is top notch, great work!

19 hours agothekevan

Hey thanks!

13 hours agovisiwig

Great idea man, must be pulling in some good SEO traffic as well.

21 hours agodylanhouli

Like this user has a comment history of hyping show HN

18 hours agoFrannky

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.

13 hours agodylanhouli

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

21 hours agovisiwig

this matches my experience exactly

12 hours ago3duardol1m455

comments ...

6 hours agolakpahana

What's the license?

a day agostarkparker

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.

a day agovisiwig

this is exactly what i needed

19 hours agoshah4as1

Glad I shared at the right time :)

13 hours agovisiwig

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.

18 hours agoTheodores

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.

13 hours agovisiwig

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

18 hours agoFrannky

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?

9 hours agolukan

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

12 hours agovisiwig

Your bank statements for the last six months should be sufficient.

8 hours agooniony

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

10 hours agopostsantum

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.

17 hours agoj45

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.

6 hours agoohyoutravel
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17 hours ago

Unclear but I will say upon opening the site I was sparked with joy and excitement to use them

14 hours agomikodin

Your behavior makes HN worse the same way AI bots do it

6 hours agoowebmaster

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!

6 hours agoohyoutravel

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

18 hours agoFrannky
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4 hours ago

Yes we are all paid bots, thanks for your valuable input, chump

7 hours agodemocracy

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5 hours agomartinvalchev

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2 hours agoSamlion

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17 hours agodecker502

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16 hours agorealaliarain74

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20 hours agoHalawehMohann49

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16 hours agoAbrarTheCrypt34

Tell me more.