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The old saying ‘That a picture is worth a thousand words’ is very apt for marketing. A lot of the interest and impact from marketing comes from having just the right image that tells a story and makes the customer want to find out more. The problem is that most companies have limited time and budget for their marketing and can’t really afford to commission unique art for small run of flyers or brochures. What they do instead is scrabble around the internet and grab the first thing that Google Image search throws up that ‘sort’ of works, regardless of the quality or legality of the image. The fact is you don’t have to do this. There are many ways of getting high quality artwork for your marketing material for very little cost or none at all.
Notice that I talked about quality and legality in the opening paragraph. This is because most of the artwork on the internet isn’t designed for use in print or is owned by someone who might be upset about you ‘stealing’ art they have paid for their use alone. In a nutshell, most images on the internet are designed for the internet and be only seen on a screen, which works with much lower dpi than what is required for printed artwork. I talk about it more in 6 common issues when getting graphics for printing. On the legal side, everything put up on the internet is owned by someone (often not the person who put it up there) and unless they have given permission to allow it to be reused/remixed you taking to use for your own needs is breaking the law. How it actually works is very very complex and far outside the scope of this article, but while the chances of you being caught ‘borrowing’ a bit of art off a website is fairly low, it still happens. But why put yourself though these hassles when there are a few simple solutions to get you the artwork you need.
If you are using a search engine to find useable clipart, here’s what you do to make sure it is free to use.
From there the same rules apply for picking images from the internet.
The two stand bys I have when looking for images that I don’t have to buy to use is Wikimedia Commons and Open Clipart. Now these are websites where the owners of the artwork donate it to public use without charge. Depending on the creator they may want acknowledgement of their creation, limit the use to certain situations, to requiring some form of donation/payment if used commercially. The quality can vary a bit as a lot the creators are amateurs and there isn’t always a guarantee that what you are looking for will be there, but they make a good starting place.
There’s a huge number of free clipart / stock art / stock photo / etc out there; far too many to list. When you search for the image in your browser just put the words ‘free clipart’ or ‘free stock’ in front of it and something will come up. Now most of these places will be working with commercial stock art suppliers you often get a lot of high quality art for no cost, but not as great a selection when you are looking for one particular thing. Because of the commercial sponsorship you should always read the terms and conditions that come up with the artwork before you click okay, or you may end up being charged.
In the end, sometimes you have just have to pay for the quality (or size) that you need (many of the free sources only have low dpi images and may not be suitable for printing). Commercial stock art suppliers will provide a huge range of choices, give you lots of related images to the one you pick so you can build a set, and will make it painless to spend your money. The catch is most of them require you to sign up to a membership, buy credits to pay for the art, and still be hamstrung by what you can do with it. There’s also a huge amount of variation on prices based on the resolution and size you are working with, and often the exact same image can cost wildly different prices from different suppliers. If you don’t’ want to get stuck reading pages of fine print, let us at Copy Express buy it on your behalf, has we have access to several suppliers, will find the right size you need and make sure you can use it as much as you want.
That’s when you head out to the world of commissioning art and design, which is beyond the scope of the article. However if you want to go in that direction, we at Copy Express are more than happy to work with you in the process of having something unique being made for you.