Whether you’re making social media postings, creating a flyer or an image for a blog or webpage, if you have a business you probably need some images. You want a visual style that matches your professionality, your company culture, your product. It needs to look good. Preferably for free or cheap. How can you do that?

Something you need to know first

You need the rights to use any image that you share, so it must either be a photo you took or image you created, something that you purchased the rights to, or that is available for free commercial use with modification. Without modification is okay, if you don’t want to change anything about it at all, including putting words on it.

The best bets are to take your own photos, create your own images is a program like gimp, or get images from a reliable source.

 

Reliable Free Image Sources

Using Google’s search tool to filter images “by licence” is confusing at best, and we don’t recommend it for a number of reasons, the main one being that you can’t really access the licence that accompanies the photo, so what licencing it has is really being guessed at.

Instead you can go the safer route and use one of these free sites, which clearly list what licensing the images are released under. You’ll find that they all have a disclaimer like “oh and there may be other rules we didn’t mention”, but that’s just them covering their rumps.  Read the license info to know whether you have to attribute authorship or any other rules.

And I think it goes without saying that there are numerous great sites to pay for images to use commercially, such as BigStockPhoto.comiStockPhoto.com, and ShutterStock.com.

 

D-Kode website development

 

 

Tools to create the final image:

Once you have the illustration that fits your needs, put words on it to express what you’re trying to share. There are also great free graphic design tools out there that are super easy to master.

Upload your company logo in .png format, not .jpg. Only the .png format has that translucent background that allows your logo to layer into the image seamlessly. If you don’t already have a .png version of your logo, here’s a tutorial on making a translucent logo in photoshop.

 

Now just save and share your images!