The value of photography in Web design

A photograph can say a thousand words, right? In this article we’ll explore the meaning and the value of good photography in modern web design.

We all know that a good photo brings life to web design. The standard for ages now has been usage of stock photos. Why? Stock photos are of great quality and looks awesome. But it’s not all that great. Even though stock photos are really high quality, they are a bit unnatural and cold. It doesn’t bring a unique and warm feel, well at least most of them. Also you can notice that many websites use the same stock photos. You can see this if you are in web design industry. So when you see that a company instead of it’s own photos uses stock photos it’s a bit unreal and not personal enough.

Before it was very hard to find good quality free photo, but today that’s not the case anymore. There a re a lot of sites with high quality free photos, so if you can’t use your own photos for some reason, maybe it’s time to choose those instead. Why? They are high quality, looks great, those images has natural and warm feel and brings much more that a traditional cold stock photo to the site. This is specially usable for online magazines and bloggers. You can find images from wide range of categories on those free galleries, like nature, food, people, etc.

We wrote a blog post on 70+ galleries that offer free high quality free photos. You can find it on our official site. We pin pointed some of the best and our won favorites and highlighted them. We believe you’ll find it useful.

So, the conclusion is: there is a lot of high quality free photos you can use on your site that will bring better feel to the site than cold stock photos. This is of course not the case for all types of websites. For example if you have a shop, you need real photos, high quality photos of the product you are selling. But for the bloggers or online magazines, free photos are a great choice! Free photos gained in popularity in past few years and now we have really a wide range of places we can find them.

Regarding high quality graphics, there is not enough quality fre resources, so we still need to use stock graphics or custom ones, depends on the project requirements.

Thanks for reading!