I've discussed stock photography and sites for free images before, but here's an interesting list of sites courtesy of designskilz.com that have great free imagery.
Most of these sites work on a trickle out model of slowly releasing or emailing photographs, and many of these offer imagery with the very awesome Creative Commons Zero license which means you don't have to worry about attribution or any fine print. Do whatever you want with them.
Update on 2014-12-05 22:00 by Nolan Haims
And another site, with an awesome name:
Update on 2015-06-13 17:35 by Nolan Haims
And another...
Getty Images has been playing catch-up to Shutterstock in terms of innovation and the way stock photography needs to evolve. They still have wonderful content, but have always proved intimidating and cost-prohibitive to many users.
Well, they just announced that some imagery will now be free to use online in social and blog situations via provided embed codes.
This is similar to the way that YouTube allows people to embed their videos on sites. Getty's embedded images will be hosted by Getty, giving them perpetual control of the image—meaning, they can take the image down or disable the link at any time. And Getty removes the watermarks, but does include a rather large attribution at the bottom of the image. And, of course, one click of the image brings you to Gettyimages.com where—surprise—you can purchase or license the image.
Another odd thing, I think, is that the attribution is not a part of the image itself. After embedding the image, one can right-click and save the non-watermarked image to your desktop. If I were Getty, I would have put a subtle attribution on the image itself at the bottom, but I guess I'm happy they didn't.
The BIG Problem...
This all sounds great, right? If you're a blogger, you can go to Getty Images, find a great shot and for no cost, have a great and legal image for your story. Except...not all of Getty's images provide embed code...is it just royalty-free imagery? No, some RF pics have it, some don't. Some rights managed shots have it, some don't. Same with editorial. Okay, so maybe there's a search function only for images with embed codes? Nope.
So, this to me just points to Getty's lack of understanding of their users and how they can increase their customer base. This was obviously a huge decision made at the top, and I applaud them for this. But where is the announcement of this on their front page? Nowhere. How long did I search for a cool embedded shot to use at the top of this post? Too long, because I had to wade through multiple photos that didn't provide embed codes.
Here's hoping this will evolve and Getty will make this a bit more user-friendly.
Your move, Shutterstock...
Since I’m asked all the time where to go to find stock imagery—and specifically, free stock imagery—let me revisit the topic.
If You Have Money to Spend...
Shutterstock is my go-to resource for imagery, vector art and video footage. Their content is superb and their pricing model is ideal for me: Monthly or annual subscriptions that give you 25 royalty-free downloads per day. I used to also have a Thinkstock subscription which operates in a similar model. For a la carte imagery, iStock, Getty, Dreamstime, 123RF and Inmagine are good options.
FREE!
The fact is that you can find more and more quality imagery online that is not only free, but also legal to use. These are the top dogs:
- Morguefile
- Stock Exchange (350,000+ images)
- Every Stock Photo (searches 20M+ images)
- Wikimedia Commons (19M+ media files)
- Free Range Stock
- Stockvault (42,000 images)
Some more free and specialty sites to check out:
- Amazing Textures (1,600 textures)
- Bajstock
- Cepolina (20,000+ images)
- Creativity 103 (2,500 images)
- Designpacks
- Dreamstime Free Section
- Fontplay (10,000+ images)
- Fotolia Free Search Section
- Free Images (13,500 images)
- Free Media Goo
- Free Photos Bank
- FreeFoto (130,000+ images)
- Image After (28,000+ images/textures)
- Image Base
- Mayang (Textures) (4,350 textures)
- OpenPhoto
- Pixel Perfect Digital (7,500 images)
- Texture Warehouse
- Unprofound
- Woophy (1,000,000+ images)
- Gimp-Savy (27,000)
- Stock Free Images (900,000+ images)
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a licensing scheme encompassing a few different levels. Content creators can assign a desired level of license to their images, for example, allowing them to be used by others in certain situations. The most common situation you will find is a photographer who posts an image to Flickr and specifies that this image can be used by anyone with proper attribution. Some CC licenses prohibit commercial usage or manipulating the image, but in general, you will be able to use a CC image for your presentation without issue. You can find CC imagery many places, but I like:
Search Engines
For whatever reason, I find Bing’s image search engine superior to Google’s in terms of results. Plus, Bing allows you more search criteria including Creative Commons.
Vectors & Icons
Most of the major stock sites offer vector images and graphics, but here are two free or freemium sites to check out:
* * *
One last source for photos. You. Take a photo yourself and leaving aside the issue of people in your photo, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. Such as use it at the top of your blog post on free stock imagery (like I did.)
For their November 14th edition and to coincide with Paris Photo, French newspaper, Liberation printed the day's paper with all imagery removed.
Quite a comment on the PSE.
h/t Design Taxi and BJP-Online.
It's not news that people all over are experimenting with how to tell more visual stories online and on screens. One might say that this has been going on since the birth of the personal computer and then the internet, but there is definitely a new age just beginning. I think Nancy is at the forefront in her way, but I would have to say that the New York Times is leading the pack in their way. They are still the masters at visual journalism and visualizing data, but they have also been experimenting with multimedia storytelling for longform articles. It started with a story called Snow Fall, and has been followed up with similar (and in my view more successful) pieces such as The Jockey and A Game of Shark and Minnow.
Snow Fall, which the New York Times worked on supposedly for a whole year, received a lot of praise and criticism, and in the end the consensus is that it wasn't entirely successful. But that's not the point. It's the experimentation and the willingness to explore new storytelling techniques that is keeping The New York Times and people like Nancy Duarte at the forefront.
Update on 2013-11-21 16:07 by Nolan Haims
CNN.com's ATL24: A Day in the Life at the Atlanta Airport.
Great (and similar idea), but the navigation on this one was really difficult for me...
We all should know by now that the Picture Superior Effect is real, and that people respond to, process and remember imagery far better than text. But a story about a toxic swimming hole which is getting some renewed attention right now proves that no matter what the text says, some people just insist on believing in the pretty picture.
So, apparently there was a quarry in the UK that was a magnificent shade of turquoise...
The water so was so beautiful that some people refused to heed the clear textual warnings that the water was actually highly toxic and dangerous...
And they went swimming. And got sick. Very sick. Apparently the PH level in the "blue lagoon" is equal to that of bleach. Yech.
So what did the town do? If people were only going to let their sense of aesthetics guide their decisions, then that's the way it was going to be. The town died the lagoon black!
The Picture Superiority Effect rules again!
Had a lot of fun designing this short case study presentation for Edelman's Trojan Vibrations giveaway campaign as part of today's OpenCo event.
Nothing like opening your talk in front of a six-foot vibrator.
The presentation folks over at Brightcarbon are recent converts to Shutterstock as the best stock photography solution for presentations. I've long been a fan and couldn't agree more with them. Read about their conversion here.
I've seen a number of Mark Bittman's presentations which are always very good always very light on text, but I had somehow missed this one in which nearly every slide is a just an image.
Watch the video—would it have been any more memorable or effective with more text?
My favorite stock site has released an wonderfully clear and simple infographic on the 2013 design trends from their perspective.
A few more thoughts on Businessweek's cover debacle and visual storytelling written for Edelman.com...
Businessweek has produced some excellent cover designs, but they are rightfully being pilloried right now for this current cover that is so over the top, misguided and overtly racist that I hardly know where to begin.
The thing that most strikes me about the cover is that the visual story the cover tells is is one that could never in this day and age be written with words inside the magazine.
A little context: The cover story inside the magazine is about a new housing boom in Phoenix. It's a fairly non-controversial piece about home builders, house flippers, short sales, real estate agents and people who found themselves underwater with their mortgages. Apparently, things are on the rebound in Phoenix and prices are again rising after the housing bubble of a few years ago. But the cover makes no reference to the Phoenix housing market or players; it instead portrays a popular, but fallacious view of the housing bubble that blames the entire market meltdown on greedy, low-income home buyers who took advantage of the banks through fraudalent loan applications. It's a storyline popular in certain circles that absolves the banking and loan industries and portrays them as victims with no responsibility for reckless behavior that crashed the economy.
While borrowers were not completely blameless, pinning the entire economic crisis on minority home buyers is a storyline that Businessweek could never have gotten away with, because the facts are simply not there. They have too much credibility to even try to go there with their writing.
But this is a story that was all too easy tell visually—which they did with this outrageous cover.
I really can't comprehend how this cover made it past even one employee let alone past editors and publishers and all the way to print. But it did...and in the 21st century, not the 19th.
Did you know that the President gave a slide presentation Tuesday night? Barack Obama did not pull an Andrew Cuomo and use actual slides behind him, but there were indeed accompanying graphics and visuals to his State of the Union address. As in years past, the White House released an "Enhanced" State of the Union video presentation available on their website.
The White House's solution to visually communicating the President's message is to place vertical graphics next to the video at selected points. If you haven't seen how the visuals support and enhance the speech, definitely take a look.
This is a technique that I really loved initially, but this year the White House's graphics department seemed asleep at the wheel. Believe me, I know how quickly these graphics were probably created, but while there were a few moments in which the visuals truly aided the message, I felt as the entire approach lacked the touch of a skilled information designer.
There was confusing use of highlights—is the focus the blue or the red figures...?
There were color combinations that would get you kicked out of a freshman year design course—red text over blue "vibrates" and is a rookie mistake...
There was lackluster imagery, cheesy text effects and overuse of all caps...
And downright confusing stats and graphics...
What was good?
Some very direct charts and good colors...
Good use of imagery and humor...
And humanity and a sense of the personal...
I personally don't look forward to the day that projection screens are installed behind the President for the State of the Union, but it may just be inevitable.
Photoshop and Illustrator are forever open on my computer, and yet I am a big proponent of doing as much design as possible directly in PowerPoint. Very often, adding an effect or editing an image in PowerPoint is actually quicker than doing the same in Photoshop. And even more importantly, effects created natively in PowerPoint are almost always non-destructive, which means adjustments are far easier as presentation content continually shifts (because it always does...)
Gradient Boxes
One of my favorite techniques in PowerPoint is to place a semi-transparent gradient box over full-page imagery. This is a way of "editing" the photo to make it fade out on an edge or to reduce the opacity over a part of the image and to allow for the placement of text on top of it.
Continue reading the entire post at Indezine.com...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new iPad app called Haiku Deck.
At the time, they had graciously created a quick deck for me based on my Twinkie theory of presentation.
Now, they did one better, creating a Haiku Deck based on my 2 is the new 3 post.
If you haven't checked out Haiku Deck, swing by their site and download the app. It's a cool way of very quickly creating a simple text-lite presentation. It might even be a cool tool to use when training people to create more visual, less text-dependant presentations.
How do you make a presentation's imagery consistent when pulling that imagery from multiple sources?
An old trick is to apply a consistent effect to all the imagery like turning it black and white or creating duotones.
But in a presentation we created last week, one of my designers was even more careful when composing collages. She made sure that the image subjects physically worked together, and I loved how they turned out: The orbital rings overlayed on the woman's head...the Great Wall melting into the UN dais.
Awesome job, Carinda! Here are a couple of the slides from that presentation.
I LOVE this month's table of contents in Esquire.
