Free Photo Aggregator
Yesterday I came across a rather brilliant image search engine that searches several free online sites and brings all the results back to the one screen.
(ie, it “aggregates” the results like a meta search engine does — probably because it IS a meta search engine, designed specifically for free photos/images).
The website is everystockphoto — I can’t believe I only found this yesterday!
Great points about the search results …
- You can quickly see the file size (great when you need a minimum size, eg for print usage where you want a particular resolution) — given that you’re searching free photos (many of which are often too small for print needs), this is a very useful feature to have on the search results page (something I don’t find on some of the sites I regularly use);
- It searches (currently) more than 4.45 million photos;
- The license type (is the file in the public domain, do you need to attribute/credit the author etc); and
- Search results also show user ratings and even the source website.
This saves time over searching several free sites to find an image suitable for your needs. It’s particularly “brilliant” for me because it includes sites I’d normally search separately when hunting for available images for client projects, sites such as Flickr, stock.xchng and morgueFile.
I particularly like that it features Flickr photos with a usable license, so you can download and use (within the license terms) photos from that resource: millions of photos in Flickr are now easier to find.
There is also another useful resource — just within Flickr — the Creative Commons area, where you can search content under each of the Creative Commons licenses (all explained on the linked page).
Attention-grabbing graphics tool
It’s back!
Over a decade ago, my computer at the time (a Mac clone) sported a very useful, but underused, peripheral: a Wacom graphics tablet. While I used the tablet some of the time, it really ended up not getting the use it deserved (and I donated it to a very excited student several years later).
To help create Direct Response projects, I’ve just purchased a new Wacom… which will help me with adding “graphic grabbers” to help draw attention to particular elements in my copy. So instead of using my mouse and hand-editing paths in Illustrator, the tablet and pen will give me a more natural platform to create the elements I need.
Things like asterisks, lines, boxes, comments, punctuation, bullets, numbers… elements to help guide the reader through a project such as a sales letter (both through grabbing attention and highlighted the personalised nature of the communication).
In terms of creating realistic hand-written elements, the tablet is an easier and better solution than having to rely on hand-drawing and scanning, or using a mouse as input.
Of course, I’ll combine the output I create from the tablet with hand-written style fonts, scanned elements and some mouse-drawn graphics — taking advantage of all four options to give me the ideal combination of attention-grabbing graphics to retain attention.
Now — as you can see from my first attempt after installing the tablet again — I’ve just got to get used to the stylus and feel of it all! It looks hand-created… because it is hand-created!