Three Options for Finding Clip Art That is Not Junk

I often need buttons, generic
images, or just plain ideas for
graphics for a variety of
reasons: icon for an article, as
part of a larger image or
mockup of a web page, etc. Three Options for Finding Clip
Art That is Not Junk 1. Stock images – Buying your source material, if it is
copyrighted, is the only moral
thing to do. Designers worked
hard to save you the time. And
a stock website like
iStockPhoto makes it very affordable, so there’s no
reason to rip off the creator.
Searching a website stock
image website can lead you to
high-quality images and
reduce the clutter of poorly made graphics. iStockPhoto in particular has an amazing
advanced search function, by
size, shape, color, even area
where you want to put text. 2. Search engines – Google’s image search has gotten better
too. If you search by exact size
you can often find what you
need so that you don’t even
need to resize it yourself.
Again, make sure you pay for copyrighted works. But it can
also be a source of ideas and
can show you many images,
quickly. 3. Open Source – That’s generally where I stop, but I recently
found a great website called Open Clip Art Library. It is well organized, and many of the
graphics are good quality and
usable without needing
editing. It’s worth considering
as one of the first places to
search, and in fact, I’m going to start here from now on,
since stock sites and search
engines can be overwhelming.