Bringing Visual Excellence To Everyone.

Humans have always been drawn to things that catch the eye. There is a wonderful objectivity (debatably so) on what looks good and as we march through the technological age, the same applies to a good photo. When you go on a website today, there is still, for some reason, an astonishing abundance of those boring stock photos you have seen a thousand times that show two white male hands shaking hands to denote "business", an isolated and meaningless shot of a stock exchange board as a nod to "money and finance" or a laughing people image, in crisp shirts around a glass table to show that the company has "culture".

These images are incessantly boring and overused and often overlooked by the general public. A big factor for driving these types of images, are sites like Pexels, Shutterstock and Pixabay. They offer a free and seemingly easy to use service that ultimately delivers high quality images but with stereotypical images. Of course there is a need for sites like this, however if you want to cut through the clutter and stand out, you need imagery that people relate to and stand out as realistic.

Of all the sites providing stock images, Unsplash seems to be the best one that has cracked the formula. The big difference is the photos you find. They claim to have "hand-selected over 1 million images from a community of 220,000" and a brief scan of their library supports this. Whilst some have a slightly naff Tumblr feel to them, others are undoubtedly more interesting and refreshingly non-standard in their aesthetic. Unsplash appear to have curated a more interesting library of images, rather than just plonking any old image on the plate of every company. Providing access to as much free high quality photography as possible.

Another thing that Unsplash has going for them is a handful of useful integrations available to users which makes it far easier to knit the service into your workflow. BuzzFeed (a colossal news outlet), Squarespace (a site design platform) and Trello (lists and task management powered by Atlassian) are all linked to the Unsplash Application Programming Interface (API). The impact this has on boosting their credentials is huge. Firstly it’s a huge stamp of approval, and secondly renders the product so much more usable than other stock photo providers.

Imagine you are designing a website with Squarespace. You have gone through all the steps of iteration and you have your text. You can now elegantly and swiftly input images of a very high quality straight into your site with no payment at all. It is extraordinary.

Are there any issues to know about?

Without entering the ethics of whether these sites have impacted the integrity of photography as an art form, a debate worth having another day, there is one issue worth considering.

All stock photos, Unsplash and any other stock imagery site, suffer from the same detrimental flaw of feeling generic and reused eventually. If you are a company really looking to develop a smart, sleek and authentic visual storytelling experience, you may require a different approach than using Unsplash. Rant + Rave are perfectly positioned to help you weigh up the advantages of Unsplash, and provide you with insight into how best utilise images and visuals for your objectives.

If you like what you hear and would like our help, contact us at hello@rant-rave.info