Could argue about categorising all illustrations as same because a Twitter feed said so. As a designer, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want your own work to be dismissed like that, without much thought by anyone with an HN/Twitter/Reddit account. But won't argue on that too.
What I think is really unfair to mention is that unDraw has contributed to the commoditization of illustrations. On the contrary, there have been many many projects available to illustrators just because the initial design/proposal/prototype could be built with that and win over the clients. Project designs that would otherwise use photographs but not illustrations.
Sites like Upwork, Freelancer, etc. existed long before unDraw and you could find creative work there for truly humiliating prices. It's extremely inaccurate to blame unDraw for that.
The fact is that unDraw helped bring attention to illustrators and illustrations, which were called icons even a few years ago, by opening up a discussion and many new projects.
Basically that's there to protect Katerina's illustrations. The reverse-engineering has been achieved by a bunch of people and that's ok but exploiting the work she put into each design was really frustrating.
It was the easier way to signal what exactly unDraw was back then when it was launched and since SVG images are code, it was much cleaner than writing CC(whatever) for users to understand. It remains that way but it will be much clearer in the new version.
Hi, surprised to see unDraw posted here, as it's been two years since we started it! I'm Aggelos and I handle the product side of unDraw for Katerina who is the illustrator and creator of the project. So glad you like it and I'll do my best to answer your questions.
1) There's no chance of getting blindsided as Katerina started this to share work that was not used in client projects and keeps designing new ones daily since the reception of it has been amazing. In the off chance she gets tired, she'll just stop adding new ones, so no worries there!
2) She adds 2 daily for the past two years, but can't promise she'll keep up the pace during the holidays! If you want to request a specific one, she's pretty open to it on Twitter @ninalimpi. But don't share this! Haha...
3) Having the color change on the fly and offering PNG alongside SVG's, I think it would be redundant to add more options.
Btw, the footer is available in the homepage and is included in the /illustrations page for aesthetic reasons! Haha!