Saturday, December 12, 2009

Where do freelance graphic designers get the images they would use for a job

Where do freelance graphic designers get the images they would use for a job?
I need a banner made for a website, and I am looking to find free images. Do these exist? Where? Do you do graphic design?
Drawing & Illustration - 4 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
Personally... I'd create them.
2 :
Freelance graphic designers either shoot their own photos, or pay for stock photography. Stock photography is very expensive (as photographers need to earn a living also), but istockphoto.com is the cheapest that I know of. There is no 'free" place that i know of..and most likely doesn't exist. Using free images from the internet thru an internet search is unethical, and its plagerism. Proffesional graphic designers do not do this. Imagine if somebody uses your work of art without your permission...how would you feel. So avoid using any free images, unless if you get permission to use it. Hope this helps..good luck
3 :
For free source photos I use www.morguefile.com. Make sure to read the releases on each image, but most should be fine. Also for cheap images that are pretty darn good I love istockphoto.com. Most images on there run anywhere from $1 to $10. And most of them are as good as the $500 images you see on creatas and gettyimages. Good luck!
4 :
When a client can afford the service, I'd much prefer creating the image for myself, either, in illustration form, or to go out and photograph the subject, myself. If not, there are lots of photographic sources such as several stock photo services, but these are rather expensive, especially for high resolution photos. The quality of these are usually very excellent. There are also many stock photo discs for sale at many office and computer supply stores, but the more affordable, such as the Corel collections are not of the best quality. I probably have a half dozen stock photo discs on my shelves. For illustrations, there are, literally dozens of clip art collections on the racks, with each carrying as many as 20 or thirty thousand images. These discs are, either cheap or expensive, the main differences being in quality and in the quantity of images. I have about a dozen of these discs available. At the lower, and "free" end, there are hundreds of free clip art sites, but there are several problems with these. One, is that they are usually of very low resolution, so cannot be scaled up to a decent size for printing. Some of these, however are very good illustrations, which leads me to the other, very important issue with these sites. Many images I have noticed are clearly copyright infringements. I am positive, for instance, that Disney and Warner Brothers have not licensed these sites to distribute their images to the public. If they,(or you) are caught, using these clips, those companies have been known to prosecute, heavily, copyright pirates. Even if the images are not owned by someone with the wherewithal to chase down these pirates, it is still disrespectfull for designers to use these stolen images in their work. I go to these sites, on occasion, to see if any of my images have been stolen. So far, I have not found any, but I continue to be vigilant. Just take care.

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