Living Open Source

Finding the right image for an illustration or poster is key to getting your message across. Don’t ever user clip-art – it looks like you made it in a hurry at home. OK so you might have done, but quality images create a much bigger impact (just look at any advertising poster if you don’t believe me).

Now while the Internet is awash with images, finding images of real quality and with permission to use in publicity and online is a little more tricky. However, the beautiful sharing world of Open Source comes to our aid here too.

Here are a few sites, where you will find true quality images (and video on some too). Please do check specific copyright on individual images before use.

• Stock Exchange – A great community site and one where I have even shared some of my own images. Standard restrictions allow free use for non-commercial projects. Contact the image owner if you are not sure.
• FreeFoto is a huge collection of images free for most uses and available for sale for commercial and other uses including the promise that “We are happy for FreeFoto.com images to be used in services of Christian worship”.
• Image After is another great resource for images and also textures.
• iStockPhoto – Now this last one will cost a couple of dollars for the privilege of using one of their resources. But because there is greater control on content, this site has the best quality of images of this bunch by far. It also includes collections of stock vector illustrations and video segments. The $1 you might pay for an image is well worth it, especially if you spend $200 getting it printed! You can also check out their free image of the week.

So get creative…

The post image for this post came from sxc.