One of my favorite (though far from perfect) aspects of Blender is importing .SVG files and then extruding them into 3D. There have been many times when simply extruding a comic book character’s logo or something simple like that has felt so cool for me. And, of course, with Inkscape and Gimp, there are many, many more uses for .SVG files.
My main site for generic, quick, and easy .SVG images has been OpenClipArt.org. It’s got the same orange- and simple-design concept as so many Open Source programs, and all the images are in the Public Domain. I’ve been using it for about four months or so.
But lately, there have been many fishy things there, and I guess I’m just wondering what the deal with the site really is, and whether there are alternatives.
First, I can never log in to post “Thank You” comments or to submit my own .SVG files. I’ve tried everything I can think of with cookies and what-not, but have never been able to post anything since creating my account a month or two ago.
Secondly, the site was shut down for several months, and then accessible again in, like, January. Well, since that time, when you search for a .SVG, most of the responses that you get just take you to a for-profit site (Shutterstock) where they want you to buy them. That’s fine for Shutterstock and I can’t fault OpenClipArt for trying to make money where it can…but Shutterstock directly competes with them for both content and users. It would be like Blender.org linking to Maya’s site or something. It absolutely seems like OpenClipArt is basically now just, like, Photoshop Essentials or whatever, and they’re constantly trying to get you to purchase the full Photoshop (Shutterstock). Plus, the ads are kind of insidiously snuck in there, so you always want to click on them rather than the free, user-generated content.
Does anybody know anything about this suspect-looking deal between Shutterstock and OpenClipArt? (If anything else, they should just drop the pretense of being “open” if their first mandate is to instead shuffle users to a decidedly closed site like Shutterstock.)
Most of all, the site seems to have had very little new content in the past few months, and it’s just not reliable. So does anybody know of any other sites that are great, free user-generated repositories of clip art .SVG images?