Bill Knippenberg
New Member
I’m new to this and there is a lot of art work on line but you have to buy it. What are you guys doing to get it?
Thanksshutterstock is fine. image club has a good collection as well. the reps can be a pain at times.
That is what I was wondering about as well. How much does a membership cost. Prices are all over the place. I don’t want to buy it and then they are like you should have picked this plan.We have a Shutterstock membership for things like vehicle wraps. It's not that difficult to find decent images online but we decided that the last thing we want is for someone to recognize a stolen image. Not so much from the creator or photographer but from the customer seeing it somewhere else or on another vehicle. It's less likely to happen if you're not just pulling images from Google images.
We subscribe to imageclub10 and Adobe Stock. Between the two I can get well over 200 images a month—more than I need, actually.
One thing to keep in mind. When you "buy" clipart—you are not actually buying ownership of the images, but you are buying a license to use (or rent) them. There will usually be restrictions on their use.
For example, most clipart services forbid the use of their clipart in logo design or a branding scheme. This makes sense. When we design a logo, our clients should be able to own it, not just rent it. They cannot own a logo if it includes an image that is protected by someone else's copyright. And if they don't own it, they certainly won't be able to protect it as a trademark. The US Patent & Trademark Office will almost certainly deny a trademark registration for it.
Logo design work should include only original images.
Each clipart service may have other restrictions on the use of their images as well, such as a limit on the number of times an image may be used.
Most clipart services offer "royalty free" images, meaning that you are not required to contact the original artist for permission to use the artwork. You simply pay the clipart service. The clipart service acts as a broker, a middleman, for images and artwork, in the same way that organizations like BMI and ASCAP work with musicians and songwriters in handling their creative works.
These image services are a great resource. Few of us have the time, or talent, to provide original artwork or photos for most of our jobs. Ad agencies and in-house marketing departments use them extensively as well. But always read the licensing agreement before you subscribe to an image service.
Brad in Kansas City