5 years of unDraw
With Christmas a week away, it’s unDraw’s 5th anniversary and time for our traditional post for a quick yearly overview and goals for 2023!
In the post-COVID world, the main theme for everyone in tech and especially web, was “back to reality”. Which pretty much means the honeymoon was over and the consequences are well-known. Mass lay-offs that affected lots of friends, down rounds and fire-sales for startups that were admired for their astronomical growth. In this climate, unDraw continued to grow to offer more and still average over 350k users per month.
The Past Year
Passed on Investment: We started the year giving in and talking to investors for the possibility of raising capital. To keep a long story short, we pulled out of the process as raising as an open-source project felt wrong and most discussions revolved around monetizing unDraw directly, which for me is out of the question. Our plan is and remains simple. Build something with what we learnt from unDraw and our freelance careers, while keeping it open for everyone. As a result, we decided to withdraw and work on our plan on our own (at least for now).
unDraw+: To be able to keep unDraw open and self-sustained we decided to create a way for everyone that wants to support it. But we don’t want to rely on donations, so we are creating unDraw+, a collection of tools that improve everyday work, through various design assets and services. We still are in a “pre-launch” phase, with a limited number of tools available but the support has already been so motivating that we are putting some of our best work in the stable version that is coming in the next few weeks. For that a huge thank you to everyone who has already become a member!
Handcrafts & Adobe: This is also becoming a steady mention annually, but Adobe has been more than a partner throughout the years. I can’t thank enough the Creative Cloud Partnerships team for their continuous commitment to bringing more open-source to everyone. Their support has enabled us to re-design and re-build unDraw Handcrafts into a stand-alone collection that compliments the illustrations and helps to build better sites, documents and graphics as fast as possible. The best part is being able to share them not only on Photoshop and XD but also to the open-web for everyone!
The future
After this busy year, we will finally be releasing all the work we’ve created. But also the “newbie” phase is now gone for us and we’re entering the next stage where we want to be more expressive and share more. More art, more of our work, more of our projects and more of our opinions and experiences. Anyway, onto some more specific goals:
New unDraw: With half a decade in the mirror, it’s time to look towards the future and repair the roof before it starts leaking. This means that unDraw has to be re-invented, incorporating everything we learnt along the way. This has been a work-in-progress for more than half a year and it’s finally almost ready to happen soon. So get ready for a few exciting months with a brand new unDraw and unDraw+, which together with Handcrafts will continue to be a standard for builders and creatives.
As I mentioned unDraw is at the end of a transition that will ensure its viability for the future. With this out of the way, I can personally work on my art much more than I was able to. We can also focus as a team on a stealthy startup that has gotten us really excited! (a story for another time) For now, I hope you enjoyed the first 5 years and are ready for even better and more years in the future, filled with illustrations and design! Thank you for all the support and motivation. It’s truly been a life-changing experience and without each one of you using it, it wouldn’t have been the same!
