Deciding What Type of Illustrations to Use on Your Website


by Tim Priebe - Date: 2006-12-18 - Word Count: 412 Share This!

Every website needs illustrations. It's a long-known fact that they break up long sections of text and help make them more interesting. So how do you determine what to use to illustrate your site?

Let's look at the three biggest possibilities for illustrating your website.

Stock photographs

Perhaps you work out of your home or in some environment where photos wouldn't be appropriate or professional. Or maybe you even do contract work in a classified environment. There are plenty of situations in which stock photography is perfectly acceptable.

Maybe your website is about something you can't readily obtain photos of yourself. Say, outer space. In that extreme case, it's millions of dollars cheaper to use some stock or public domain photos than to get them yourself.

If you need some stock images, visit iStockphoto today. They have very affordable images, with most of them costing just $1 apiece. I use them any time I need stock images for a client's site.

Custom photographs

If you have plenty of custom photos or the ability to take them, you won't need to use stock photos. However, if the pictures are not of professional quality, it might be time to hire a professional photographer for an hour or two.

If you can't afford a professional, grab someone whose hobby is photography. A hobbiest who keeps up on the latest trends in photography is still better than having stock photos, and much better than unprofessional custom pictures.

Artwork

This type of illustration is appropriate for websites of artists, musicians, comic books, and abstract concepts. If you are an artist, you will obviously want your artwork on your website instead of traditional photos. If you are printing a comic book, you will want plenty of artwork so that visitors get the feel for how they'll like the artwork of your comic.

If artwork is the direction you want to go but you're not an artist, there are plenty of websites out there. Just type in "stock artwork" in your favorite search engine for a list of places to go to purchase artwork. Also, the previously mentioned iStockphoto has some artwork as well. When you're searching their site, select "Illustrations" from the drop down box.

Other types of illustrations include charts and graphs, flash animation, screen-captures and computer-generated images.

It's entirely possible your site will end up needing some combination of the different types. If so, make sure the images complement one another. They shouldn't look out of place next to each other They should have a similar look and feel.


Related Tags: website, web, site, art, artwork, photographs, photos, illustrations

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. Hiscompany has developed and maintained website for dozens of smallbusinesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog withfree website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: