Clipart/Stock Photos = Cheap

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No matter how cute the clipart puppy is, if it's on a piece of marketing material for an event, it screams cheap. Many schools use clipart because they think it's the only free way to use images. Not really true. The web has many great resources for you and your student leaders to get free, high quality images that you can use for your marketing. Here's a brief list:

 

• Sxc.hu is the largest free photo site on the web with millions of images. I use this one all the time as my main source.
• Stockvault.net has over 8,000 royalty free photos for personal and education projects.
• Openstockphotography.org is a search engine that goes through all of the Wikimedia Commons images, which as of April 2007 was over 1.3 million.
• Flickr.com is run by Yahoo and has millions of photos uploaded by amature photographers from around the world. The trick with Flickr is each photo has a different set of copyright settings attached to it, so you'll want to read about Creative Commons before you grab the photo you love. 

Here's to happy photo finding and better looking marketing materials for campus events.

 

Comments

[Brian]

I, personally, like the Google image search feature. That's where I get 95 percent of my images for marketing,etc.

[Tom Krieglstein]

The problem with Google images, is that you don't know what the copyrights are that go along with each image you use. In some cases the provider won't care, and in other cases they might consider it stealing. That is what is nice about the sites I listed above is they are all Royalty Free.

[photos stock]

I found one photography search engine that meets the needs of all graphics designer and photo searchers. It has about 6 million photos! Please check http://xcavator.net/