Image Credit: publikaccion.es

Point and Click

It’s all too easy to equate online content to online writing – but there’s much more to it than that. Today you’ll find that the best sites have a good mix between both static and dynamic content, video, podcasts and images.

Fantastic images can lend a site a real edge. Best of all for social media is using your own photos and thereby adding to your own narrative. But if you don’t have the time or the equipment, there is nothing wrong in tapping the Internet’s goldmine of free resources.

So, in the spirit of usefulness, and without further ado here is a post filled with links: (thanks to @noodlepie for pointing some of them out and @mattparsons for the logo site)

Seven image banks that every web-designer could use daily:

• Flickr – The best known and most useful. Contains more than 100,000,000 images with a Creative Commons license.
• FreeFoto – A website that bills itself as the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet
• Free Digital Photos – Good for wildlife and nature, also free
• Sport gfx – Probably the best bank of football photos from the Premiership, European and International matches
• Wellcome Images – All with a Creative Commons license – some excellent science photographs
• OpenStock Photography – A wide variety of photography all licensed under the Wikipedia Commons
• Best brands of the World – Image bank containing a good number of the world’s most famous brand logos. – You’ll need to get permission to use them.

(If you do use any licensed images, make sure you don’t stray outside of the boundaries of a specific license and it is important to check. Also, why not let the photographer know? They’ll probably appreciate it.)

Four useful online tools and applications:

• Tin Eye Reverse Image Search: Allows you to trace images across the net, and see where they came from originally, and if they have been copied or modified. Potentially very useful.
• Multicolour Search Lab: Excellent. It allows you to search for images by colour, and only returns results equipped with a Creative Commons license.
• Splashup: Probably the best substitute for Photoshop if you can’t afford the Adobe license.
• Photoshop Express: Touch up, tune, tweak and tint your photos. Or so it says.

Six examples of photojournalism:

The Internet and photojournalism seem to go together particularly well. Here are six examples of excellent photojournalism in newspapers and personal blogs that I’ve noticed recently:

• Gideon Mendal – A Deadly Cargo – documents the desperately sad fight against Aids on the Zambian, Zimbabwean border.
• Erik Gauger – Notes from the Road
  
• The Boston Globe – London From Above | Pirates of Somalia
• The Guardian – Charing Cross Bookshops - image-led, interactive feature
• Glenna Gordon – Scarlet Lion: Liberia
• Maladia – Maladia

One way in which designers can save the world:

• Designers Can Change

And, I’ll finish this birthday party of links off by sending another one out, this time to Adam Blenford, another very talented photographer who appears to have been racking up some air miles.

And the future?