Clip Art Weirdness
As someone who lacks any real artistic talent, but who appreciates the value of images in crafting a message, I make pretty heavy use of stock photography. Enough so that certain figures in advertisements are starting to look eerily familiar.
Anyway, I've got no objection to good free stuff, and I'll give credit when appropriate, but I've come to realize that I would rather spend a couple of bucks to buy the rights to use a piece with no headaches from istockphoto than have to do a notification dance with some stranger from stock.xchng. Some of it is cynicism - I think I assume these people are crazy by default because it's the internet - but honestly more of it is that I have no clue what the etiquette for the situation is. I guess I feel that implicit in notification is the possibility that the photog will go "Ye gods, I don't want it used for _that_" and then I'll have to redo my work. I don't object to the idea that they can do so - I'm a big booster of the artist deciding on the use of their work - but it's not a conversation I want to deal with, so I spend a couple of bucks to avoid it.
(Of course, I also spend the couple of bucks to make it at least a bit less likely that I'm tapping some vastly overused image, but there's never any real certainty of that.)
Just something I'm over in my head.
Anyway, I've got no objection to good free stuff, and I'll give credit when appropriate, but I've come to realize that I would rather spend a couple of bucks to buy the rights to use a piece with no headaches from istockphoto than have to do a notification dance with some stranger from stock.xchng. Some of it is cynicism - I think I assume these people are crazy by default because it's the internet - but honestly more of it is that I have no clue what the etiquette for the situation is. I guess I feel that implicit in notification is the possibility that the photog will go "Ye gods, I don't want it used for _that_" and then I'll have to redo my work. I don't object to the idea that they can do so - I'm a big booster of the artist deciding on the use of their work - but it's not a conversation I want to deal with, so I spend a couple of bucks to avoid it.
(Of course, I also spend the couple of bucks to make it at least a bit less likely that I'm tapping some vastly overused image, but there's never any real certainty of that.)
Just something I'm over in my head.