Comments on: iStockphoto: A designer’s best friend or biggest threat to her job?

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:12:04 +0000

I thought the sweetness of the coin jar was that it was a $125 stock pic for a story on frugality. Cheap photo: cheap story. The cover won’t win any awards, but it got the job done.

By: James Lambert

James Lambert — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:34:52 +0000

That’s crazy. You’d think at some point they would have just bought exclusive rights to the bird photo.
Note:
If this appears more than once I apologize. Having some trouble posting. Think my connection is buggy at the moment.

By: Charles Apple

Charles Apple — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:10:59 +0000

Oops. It was a USA Today story. Fixed it. Thanks, John.

By: John Telford

John Telford — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:12:16 +0000

Hey Chuck, your Shepard Fairey link takes you to Oxley’s work on iStock.

By: mcbexx

mcbexx — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:28:55 +0000

So basically anyone with 15 bucks can pick up the Twitter bird and put in on their website, thus diluting a visual “trademark” of an alleged multi-million (billion? Hard to keep track these days) Web 2.0 enterprise. That sounds smart.

P.S.: Looks like Twitter has changed the look of it’s main page recently. Oxleys Twitter bird image is gone.

By: Kara Udziela

Kara Udziela — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:17:49 +0000

Hi. I’d just like to clarify that the \Twitter\ bird image by Simon Oxley is still making him money, having sold more than 400 times to date, and the same goes for many stock images. Unlike the parallels drawn between stock imagery and journalism, you can still sell the same stock photo over and over. Despite Wired and other editors knowing that truth, it often ends up left out of stories because it is not as titillating to say that volume sales can make decent income, and for some, six-figure salaries.

By: Casey Rogers

Casey Rogers — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:45:50 +0000

iStockphoto isn’t a designer’s biggest threat. But I wouldn’t exactly call it his best friend, either. Instead I’d say it’s staff photographers’ and illustrators’ big threat.

Instead of getting a staffer to fill a jar with some coins, write something on a piece of masking tape and slap it on there, the designer browsed a stock photo site, picked an image and did the rest in Photoshop.

Now, this is hardly shocking. I’ve done similar things, but I work at a small newspaper, circulation under 50,000. Sometimes our photographers are too busy, or I don’t come up with a photo illustration idea in time for them to shoot it. What’s shocking is to see this on the cover of Time.

If buying cheap stock photos is causing photographers to be laid off, yeah that’s a bad thing. If on the other hand it’s freeing up the staffers to go out and shoot more stuff, rather than sit in the studio that sounds like a good thing to me. And if it’s cheaper than the big, older stock services, all the better for struggling publications.