The use of stock art is prolific in the graphic design world, you only have to visit websites such as www.istockphoto.com to know that there is a huge demand for stock art, and it’s not just the punters asking for it.

By punters I mean customers and business owners, excuse the crass wording, but it just felt right at the time ;-))

Aside from business owners attempting to jazz up their own DIY attempts at graphic design, you’ll also find graphic design professionals searching stock databases for interesting graphics in vector format to use within their designs.

Just because someone is a graphic designer, it doesn’t mean they are able to create all of the graphics that feature in their designs. When you view the portfolio of a graphic designer, not everything you see within a design is necessarily of their own creation.

It could be stock art, and under the copyright ownership of another individual - this is an important point to note for a business owner and I’ll talk about that more in a moment.

Many of the components of a good design requires illustrative skills and not all designers are accomplished illustrators. For instance even a ’simple’ XP style icon requires illustrative skills.

Graphic designers can often be simply very good ‘layout designers’….highly adept at pulling graphic components together in a meaningful and imaginative way that delivers a strong marketing message, but not necessarily able to create all of the components themselves.

Much in the way that I often use photographs within my layout designs - I’m not a photographer and hence I rely on stock libraries to source my photographs and use them within my creations.

Another reason why a graphic designer might be inclined to use a stock library for their graphics could be cost.
When very low cost stock agencies such as www.istockphoto.com exist and contain thousands of high quality vector images for use within graphic design projects at just £2.50 a pop, this is a considerable cost saving to a client for something that could easily cost more like £250.00 to acquire if custom designed.

There are some compelling arguments for the more costly route of custom designed graphics however, and as usual, one does tend to get one one pays for.
Whilst it can be tempting to give into client requests for a project delivered at a lower cost and turn to stock art rather than original art, lets go over the benefits of custom designed graphics for each project;

1. Copyright! This is a biggie. If you want a graphic or illustration to be part of your brand image or a major part of your marketing campaigns, you can’t very well do that if you don’t actually own the copyright to the illustration used.

You may love the illustrated character mascot your designer picked up from Istockphoto for £2.50 and added to your company name text, but you don’t believe that the original designer is actually going to hand over the copyright for £2.50 for it do you?

How to you expect to base your brand around an image you do not own, what do you think the original designer will say if they catch you attempting this? It also means you cannot TM the image in connection with your company name.

Take a good read of the istockphoto licence agreement for instance: http://www.istockphoto.com/license.php

It is important not to use stock image as part of a trade mark or business name….in Istockphoto’s own words you must not use the images on sale as;

….. part of a trade-mark, design-mark, trade-name, business name, service mark, or logo;

….. I’m pretty certain this important clause escapes many business owners notice and yet it could land them in some hot and expensive water. Most stock libraries will carry a similar stipulation about image use.

2. Originality. It’s all very well and good trying to project yourself as a unique service and/or product, but that doesn’t really fly when someone sees your competitor using the same images as you. It just doesn’t ‘feel’ very original at that point.

3. Suitability. It can sometimes be quite difficult to frankenstein a stock image to ‘force fit’ a businesses marketing message and overall ethos. On the whole you’ll achieve a better result from marketing images tailer made for your brand. Then they can be part of your brand - because you can ensure that you purchase the copyright to them once they are created.

Can you think of any other pro’s or con’s of stock art?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Art, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.