Show HN: Hotpot – A tool to make graphic design easier | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hotpot – A tool to make graphic design easier

hotpot.ai

28 pointspanabee18 comments

Hi HN!

See the offer below to use Hotpot free.

I'm the founder of Hotpot (https://hotpot.ai/). Hotpot helps non-designers create professional graphics and differs from other tools because we focus on challenges faced by developers and indie entrepreneurs.

The company was born out of frustration over App Store screenshots — existing tools were too complex and talented designers were uninterested. If you enjoy rejection, I recommend inviting designers to work on app screenshots. :P

Over time, Hotpot has grown and now offers templates for social media, e-commerce stores, Product Hunt, YouTube, and more.

Many of our features were designed with HN in mind:

- ML features, including background removal, image super-resolution, image style transfer, and color suggestions

- API-based graphic creation, allowing integration with Fastlane and other systems

- Firefox/Chrome/Safari extension screenshots and graphics

- macOS app graphics and Mac Store screenshots

- Mobile app graphics and App/Play Store screenshots

- Automation of repetitive tasks like resizing iOS icons/images and localizing strings (we preserve the localization format for apps, websites, and videos while translating with Bing/Google)

While building a graphic editor is far from rocket science, it's also painfully far from checkers. Browser disparities (argh, Firefox), font rendering (Chinese fonts), smooth ruler performance, and other hurdles conspired to make Hotpot unexpectedly complex. If there's interest, I can elaborate.

Free offer: if you want free graphics, shoot me an email. I have learned a lot from HN and would love to give back.

I just tried it because I thought your comment was really thoughtful. My situation is that I recently made a Facebook group for a small not-for-profit, and figured I'd see how it did at creating a new cover. It did fine :-)

I think my challenge is that I'd normally use Canva for this and Canva is ridiculously good, even with the free plan. Canva sucked the oxygen out of image customization, at least for SMBs with basic requirements. I don't know whether they even try to do automation, though, so that market may be unserved. Good luck!

thanks for trying hotpot and also for the earlier advice. canva is an amazing company and $6bn gorilla so rather than compete directly, we're in the short term focused on underserved areas like apps and graphic automation with ML and APIs.

as thanks for the kind feedback, i would love to offer free access to hotpot plus our ML services. what's the best way to do that? there's no contact info in your profile.

I'm glad you're going for the underserved areas. Thanks for the offer, too! My needs are really basic so I don't need free access, but I appreciate that you thought of it.

NB: The email field in your HN profile is not shown to other people. You need to put it in "about" in your profile in order for others to see it.

Love that you're doing this! Some questions and feedback:

When downloading background removed images, they all save as the same filename. It would be useful to suffix the existing filename. Speaking of the background remover, the gold standard seems to be remove.bg. I compared the quality and it seems, comparatively, hotpot's edge detection is not as tight. Is this something you guys are actively working on or is it "done" for now? I'm asking because I was looking for options to remove backgrounds of about 1500 images, but remove.bg is awfully expensive.

Regarding the organization, its very clean but also seems very simple for a graphics SaaS. At the minimum it would be nice to see a search bar in front to see what's available and make each parent clickable. i.e. Clicking on instagram shows all instagram options in one place.

I relate to your initial pain point of trying to find a good and easy way to get app store screenshots and was surprised by lack of quality options. Glad you expanded into other categories as well.

Good luck!

hi there! thanks for the detailed comment.

yes, remove.bg is awesome. we're still actively improving our edge detection, and hope to have new improvements ready within a few days.

could you share sample images that didn't perform well? then we can see if the new training data and model changes helped.

are you referring to the clickable parent for the sidebar or in the main section?

if you want a promo code to use hotpot for free, please reach out.

I can send them to you - where should I email?

I meant for the sidebar. Would love a promo code to use :)

Oh wow. This is epic. Such a resource for developers with monkey hands (when it comes to design that is).

thanks for the kind words! please let us know if you run into any issues or have suggestions on new templates you want.

also please ping me if you want a promo code. thanks again for the kind words! :)

Promo code?!

if you want a promo code to use the site for free graphics. :)

wow this is pretty cool g.j. man pinning this for my list later: https://www.octomoose.com/design

I want this but for PowerPoint slides

FYI - per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, “Please don't delete and repost. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.”

And more practically, if no one cares, ask a friend to write your Show submission title (or: how would you describe it to a friend at a bar after a drink or two?). Also, make a detailed comment explaining why you made it and what it would let someone accomplish.

noted and updated the post with a comment. thanks for taking the time to offer guidance on not a/b testing and how to improve future posts.

troydavis is right on both points: (1) please don't delete and repost; and (2) describe your project the way you would to a friend over drinks (looks like you did a good job of this above). There are more tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638.

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