Pablo Stanley: The Designer Behind Humaaans, Open Peeps, and Blush
Pablo Stanley is one of the most prolific open-source illustration creators in the design world. From Humaaans to Open Peeps, Bottts, and the Blush platform — here's everything he's built and why designers love his work.
If you've ever dragged a mix-and-match character illustration into a Figma file, there's a good chance Pablo Stanley made it. He's one of the most influential illustration creators in the design community — not because he works for a massive studio, but because he's been relentlessly shipping free, open-source illustration libraries for years.
Who is Pablo Stanley?
Pablo Stanley is a Mexican-born designer, illustrator, and serial builder currently working at Vercel on v0. He previously co-founded Blush (an illustration platform), served as Lead Designer at InVision, and co-founded Carbon Health. Beyond product work, he runs design workshops through Sketch Together, teaches free courses on YouTube, hosts a Spanish-language design podcast called Diseño Cha Cha Cha, manages the Latinxs Who Design directory, and writes a comic series called The Design Team.
What sets Pablo apart is his commitment to making illustration accessible. Almost everything he creates is free for personal and commercial use — no attribution required, no hidden licensing traps.
Humaaans
Humaaans is probably Pablo's most famous project. It's a modular illustration library where you mix and match people using interchangeable clothes, hairstyles, poses, and scenes. It hit #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt in December 2018 and quickly became a staple in design teams worldwide. The library is open-source, works in Figma, Sketch, and any tool that handles SVG, and the diversity of characters makes it genuinely useful for real product work — not just mockups.
Open Peeps
Open Peeps takes a different approach: hand-drawn, sketch-style character illustrations built as modular blocks. Arms, legs, facial expressions, and clothing are all separate pieces you can recombine to create unique characters. The hand-drawn aesthetic gives projects a warmer, more approachable feel compared to polished vector libraries. It's free, open-source, and available on Blush with a Figma plugin for quick generation.
Bottts
Bottts is a free robot illustration library built for Sketch. You combine frames, antennas, sensors, accessories, and colours to create unique robot characters. It's particularly popular for tech products, empty states, and onboarding flows where a friendly robot face works better than a generic icon. The 22 base designs multiply into hundreds of combinations through the mix-and-match system.
Open Doodles
Open Doodles is a set of 32 free hand-drawn scene illustrations. Unlike the modular character libraries, these are complete compositions — people working, collaborating, relaxing, and creating. They're designed to be customised: you can adjust colours to match your brand, scale them to any size, and use them commercially without restrictions. The loose, sketchy style makes them versatile across different product contexts.
Blush — the illustration platform
Pablo co-founded Blush to solve a problem he kept seeing: designers needed quality illustrations but couldn't afford custom work for every project. Blush is a platform where illustrators publish mix-and-match collections, and designers generate unique compositions through a web editor or Figma plugin. The platform hosts over a dozen collections including Street Life, Fancy Plants, Happy Bunch, Fresh Folk, Miroodles, and more — each with a distinct visual style but the same modular approach.
All Blush collections offer free medium-resolution downloads, with high-resolution versions available through a subscription. The Figma plugin is particularly powerful — you can generate random character combinations directly on your canvas and customise colours without ever leaving your design file.
Avataaars
Before Humaaans, Pablo created Avataaars — a mix-and-match avatar library that lets you combine clothes, hair, emotions, accessories, and colours. It reached #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt and spawned a web-based avatar generator at getavataaars.com. If you've seen those cartoon-style profile avatars across tech products and social media, there's a good chance they originated from this library.
Pablo's impact on the illustration ecosystem
What Pablo Stanley pioneered — free, modular, mix-and-match illustration systems — has become the standard approach for illustration libraries. Before his work, most free illustrations were static scenes you couldn't customise. The idea that you should be able to swap hairstyles, change skin tones, and mix poses without opening Illustrator changed what designers expected from illustration packs.
This modular philosophy has influenced creators across the entire ecosystem. The ThreeDee 3D library (Characterz, Headz, Avatarz, Illustrationz, and more) takes the same concept into 3D — fully rigged Blender characters where you mix and match bodies, heads, accessories, and expressions. Pablo has endorsed ThreeDee's work in his newsletter, recognising the shared DNA: both systems prioritise diversity, modularity, and giving designers creative control rather than forcing them into static, one-size-fits-all assets.
Recommended: ThreeDee 3D packs
If you appreciate Pablo's modular approach to illustration but need 3D assets, the ThreeDee ecosystem is the natural next step. Characterz offers over 2 billion character combinations, Headz gives you 400,000+ modular 3D head variations (great as an Apple Memoji alternative), Avatarz provides upper-body 3D cartoon avatars, and Illustrationz is a massive multi-purpose library with 167 million+ combinations. All ship with Blender source files and pre-rendered PNGs.
Browse Pablo Stanley's libraries
You can find all of Pablo's illustration libraries in our directory. Whether you need hand-drawn characters, modular vector people, friendly robots, or curated scene illustrations — his work covers a remarkable range of styles, and almost all of it is free for commercial use.
