Who is Zoish?
Illustrator and digital product maker. Known for Notionists avatar library, nine volumes of free hand drawn Notion icons.
This page recognises Zoish for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I keep running into those loose black ink avatars and icon packs on Notion dashboards and I want to know who draws them, what is free, and whether commissioning a custom one is worth it.”
Almost all of the icon work is free on Gumroad and the Notionists avatar library is CC0, so you can build an avatar yourself at no cost. The paid work is the commission: a portrait drawn by hand from your photo, starting at $30 for one person and running to a team package.
The Notionists avatar library sits on Zoish's Gumroad at a price of zero and under a CC0 1.0 dedication, which is a stronger giveaway than it sounds. CC0 means no attribution required, no licence to track, nothing to ask permission for. That is why DiceBear was able to fold it into its open source avatar engine, where the credit file still reads "Designer: Zoish" and points back to the original Gumroad page.
Before the avatars there were icons. Zoish shipped nine volumes of hand drawn Notion icons, each one packaged the way Notion people actually want it: a Notion page you duplicate into your own workspace, plus a PNG download, working fine on a free Notion plan. Every volume is priced at zero. The rating counts on those pages run from the thirties into the seventies, which for free products means a lot of people bothered to come back and say thank you.
The paid side is the part that cannot be automated. Custom Notion Avatar is a commission: you upload a photo, Zoish draws the portrait by hand in Procreate and then vectorises it, and it comes back in three to seven days depending on the package. Gumroad's own profile data for the store shows 33 products and an average rating of 5.0 across 1,415 ratings.
The icons arrived first, and the price was always zero
Zoish's route into Notion ran through illustration. The first product, Notion Icons, is a hand drawn set built to freshen up a dashboard without dragging in a whole design system, and the pitch on the page is plain: bring your templates to life, freshen up your dashboard or social media with minimal icons. It shipped as a Notion template you duplicate plus a PNG bundle, licensed for personal use, and it worked on the free Notion plan. Then it kept going. Volume 2, then 3, all the way to Volume 9, every one of them free. Around them grew a small family of the same drawing style applied to different jobs: an Alphabet and Numbers pack for headers and covers, a Notion Daily Planner with the icons already embedded, and the Notion Treasure Bundle at $10, which is the only place the icons meet mini illustrations and light and dark thumbnail words in one download.
A portrait drawn from your photo, one order at a time
The custom avatar service is the one place where Zoish sells hours instead of a download. The product page describes the appeal in the Notion community's own terms: "Obtaining an Avatar is seen as a badge of honour among the Notion Community." Each order is drawn by hand in Procreate from a photo you upload after checkout, then vectorised so it holds up at any size. Three tiers are listed. Creator at $30 covers one person with a single revision and a seven day turnaround. Entrepreneur at $75 shortens delivery to five days, adds three revisions and a digital sticker edition. Teams at $99 per member adds unlimited revisions, a social media kit and free renewal, aimed at workspaces that want everyone on the dashboard drawn in the same hand. Bulk orders get a discount that scales with size.
Then the faces were given away, parts and all
Notionists Avatar Library took the commission and opened it up. Instead of one finished portrait, the download is a kit of interchangeable parts: gesture, accessories, brows, eyes, nose, beard, lips, hair and body, built as nested components so you mix and match your own face in Figma or Sketch. The download carries the Figma file, the Sketch file, PNG and SVG. The licence is CC0, spelled out on the page as free for commercial and personal use with no need to credit or license anything. DiceBear picked it up and remixed it into a seeded generator, shipping it as two of its avatar styles, Notionists and the stripped back Notionists Neutral. The scale of what the remix inherited shows in the style definition: 64 hair variants, 30 mouths, 25 clothing options, 20 noses, 13 brow shapes, 12 beards, 11 pairs of glasses and 10 gestures. Because it is CC0, most of the software now serving those faces has no obligation to say where they came from.
Where the pen has gone since
Zoish now describes the work more broadly than Notion. The bio.link hub that DiceBear still credits is headed "Visual Storyteller + Illustrator", and the X profile lists international representation by the illustration agency Illozoo with commissions routed through them. The Notion catalogue is still there and still mostly free, sitting alongside links to Procreate brushes and colour palettes on Etsy and a printed journaling workbook on Amazon. The other ongoing thread is @Notionists, a separate account Zoish runs as a Notion templates market and community, described on its own profile as made by @heyzoish. The Gumroad bio still reads "Building the Notionists", which is the through line: a drawing style that started as icons for other people's dashboards and turned into an identity a lot of Notion people wear.
Why Zoish is on this list
Zoish gave the Notion community a visual vocabulary and then refused to gate it. Nine volumes of hand drawn icons, an alphabet, a planner and the Notionists avatar library all went out at no cost, and the avatar library went out under CC0, which is the licence you choose when you want people to use your work without ever having to ask you. The result is that a drawing style from one illustrator became a default look for Notion dashboards and profile pictures far beyond anyone who bought a commission.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Zoish and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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