Last week I came across an interesting article from KUT News about how the Austin Independent School District used stock photography in its new teacher guide. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but this stock photo is the same one used in the internet meme ‘Unhelpful High School Teacher.’ While this instance has proved to be humorous, it led me to begin thinking about the overall use of stock photography in the graphic and web design industries.
In a nutshell, stock photography is a photo that has been licensed by a photographer for use in creative projects. In many cases stock photography is used in place of hiring a professional photographer to conduct a photoshoot or to find ‘filler’ imagery. There are two basic licenses for stock photography: royalty free and rights managed. With royalty free images a licensee, or person who has been granted a license, generally only has to pay a one time fee for use of the image. The image can then be used for things such as posters, web sites, and brochures. With rights managed licenses, the licensee has to pay the copyright holder each time the image is used. This could add up to a large sum of money depending on the use of the image. For many businesses, royalty free is the license of choice because it is affordable and generally allows an image to be used in many ways. However, there is a downside to royalty free photos and that is their wide availability. This is especially true in the case of free stock photography. In the past, stock photography was expensive and available only to the largest ad agencies with large clients and budgets. With the proliferation of digital cameras and sites that sell stock photography online, having access to a wide variety of stock photography is now easily accessible and affordable for just about anyone.
Well, that all depends on the company and the content. I am not saying to never use stock photography. Sometimes stock photography is the most cost effective means to find a solution to a design problem. For blog posts, it is usually not a big deal to use stock photography. However, I would caution against using stock photography as the imagery for your main website. The problem is that some design firms rely only on stock photography for all their needs. I have heard far too many conversations about content end with the phrase, “we’ll just use stock.” This not only hurts the agency, but hurts the client. Of course, this can also be the result of trying to create a design before content is even thought about, but that is another post for another day. My point is, that every piece of content on a website, in a brochure, or on a billboard should have meaning. There people out there who put a picture on a page just to have a picture on the page. I know we’ve all seen our fair share of telephones, envelopes, and attractive men and women with headsets on a contact page. We know what a contact page is for, we don’t need to dumb it down with stock photography. If your agency can’t come up with a more creative idea than that, then maybe it’s time to find a better graphic design firm.
Stock photography can become a crutch for some people. Instead of choosing the best types of imagery for the content, they pick and image that “fits.” This leads me back to the article above. Why didn’t AISD just take a picture of one of its teachers? There could be many reasons, but the issue is that the image they chose happened to be a popular internet meme. I am sure nobody in the administration knew about the meme, but I would imagine that quite a few students did. That is the problem with stock photography. It is difficult to know who all has used that image. In this example nobody got hurt and no reputations were damaged, but it could have had the opposite effect. What if this particular image had been used to advertise a strip club or an adult toy shop? How would that have made AISD look?
The solution to this problem is to have a solid content strategy. Remember, that content is the most important part of your website or promotional pieces. The imagery you choose should be carefully chosen and should add meaning wherever it is used. If there is enough money in the budget, consider hiring a professional photographer. A professional photographer can help create memorable visual imagery and can suggest different ways to photograph a subject that will make an impact with your customers. If you do use stock photography, and we all do, try running the image through Google Image Finder to see where it has been used before. This step alone would have helped AISD.
In the end it all boils down to content. Determine the need for imagery and decide on what kind of image compliments the text. If stock photography is the only way to go, then that is fine. However, just because stock photography is readily available, don’t use it as a crutch for your design.</p>
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