I have a friend starting up a blog, so I thought I’d randomly write up some tips. Hope others find them useful as well. This blog post deals with finding graphics.
Graphics make your blog more enticing, especially if you are sharing it on social media. So I thought I’d share how I produce graphics pretty quickly for my blog. I have a few sources and a couple of programs that make this easy.
Free Photos/Illustrations
There are a number of sites devoted to providing free graphics. Here are three of the better ones.
If you are interested in adding diversity to your graphics, there are a number of groups that provide free stock imagery of diverse people in an effort to improve the positive representation of the groups focused on. Two that I know of are image banks of people with obesity and a site for images of people of color.
You can find a number of places offering free images of people with obesity on the Obesity Image Bank page They generally come with conditions to avoid bias in the way you talk about people with obesity and some have other conditions as well.
Nappy.co offers beautiful pictures of black and brown people with an open license. I used it this morning for the beautiful photo at the top of this blog post.
This Medium article by LaToya F. has information on where to find even more positive images of people of color, though a number of the sites she mentions are not free.
If you are using WordPress.com, it has free libraries of graphics and photos you can use. Some it gets from the other free sites. Like this one from Pexels:
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
You can also take your own photos and use them. That’s one of the cheapest ways to do this.
Paid Stock Photos/Illustrations
I use Canstockphoto, and Dreamtime. I try to reuse anything I buy. Also I try not to buy much. If you are going to buy graphics, buy the smallest size possible. It’s a blog. You don’t need to print it. Also don’t discount these sites because you don’t want to pay. They give away graphics every week. For example, this is CanStockPhoto’s giveaway last week:
Handy Graphic Software
Gimp is free graphic manipulation software available for a multitude of platforms:
ArtText3 ($30 in the Mac App store) allows me to produce great original graphics with fancy lettering in about five minutes, which is faster than I can search for a free graphic. Also the learning curve is short. It’s one of the easiest programs I’ve ever used. Which is why any time you see words on a graphic on my blog it means I used ArtText3.
If you have a favorite place to get graphics for your blog, let me know in the comments below.
Whether you are looking for graphics or something else this December, I hope you find what you are looking for. Be well, friends.