death by stock images

The modern day designer phenomena. You can almost hear the despair.

There are few things more mind numbing and soul destroying than trawling stock image sites looking for something, anything that might work. What most of these sites need is a 'no crap' filter. Or just a ban on anything with arrows, silhouetted men in suits pointing, ladders, three-dimensional bar charts, handshakes. You get the picture.

As an in-house designer, I often don't have the luxury of time or budget to create art from scratch. Stock image sites then become a necessity for when you've got to get things done and out. Although typically the poor cousin of the stock sites, Shutterstock has come on leaps and bounds in their filtering. And Offset is a wonderland of human, authentic photography. You can see why the images have that slightly heftier price tag.

The upside of the trawl is that you do occasionally come across some inexplicable beauties.

Here are some of my recent favourites...