If you’re looking for some low cost but high quality images for your design work, whether it’s web design or print design, you may be interested in Fotolia. It’s an online service providing a huge collection of royalty free stock images – photographs, illustrations as both bitmapped and vector formats and video. You can buy images individually using a credit system (starting at $0.75 cents for a small image) or you can sign up for a subscription which allows you to download a certain number of images over a period of one month, six month or one year. There are also a number of images available for free download if you want to check out the quality.

New photographs and illustrations are added daily. They run in size from

• Extra small – 72 dpi, 400 x 300 pixels = 1.33 in x 1 @ 300 dpi
• Small – 72 dpi, 800 x 600 pixels = 2.66 in x 2 in @ 300 dpi
• Medium – 300 dpi, 1600 x 1200 pixels = 5.33 in x 4 in @ 300 dpi
• Large – 300 dpi, 2400 x 1600 pixels = 8 in x 5.33 in @ 300 dpi
• Extra Large – 300 dpi, 3100 x 2500 pixels = 10.33 in x 8.33 in @ 300 dpi
• Extra, Extra Large – 300 dpi, 5000 x 3000 pixels = 16.66 in x 10 in 300 dpi

All the files available on Fotolia are royalty free, which means they can be used with no limits on time, no limits on copies and no limits on geographical location. So by paying for a fully legal royalty free image, you don’t have to worry about getting a tap on your shoulder because you used that “nice image” you found on Google and thought it would be ok to download it.

Check out Fotolia for photographs, vector illustrations and video.

Just to make everything nice and transparent here, I have not been paid by Fotolia but I have been given credit to download a number of images for a month. However, let me state that I have used Fotolia myself many times in the past when I’ve needed images and I’ve also sold some photographs through the site too, so I am very familiar with the service.

Here’s a few bits and pieces of interest for designers, illustrators and photographers.

There’s a nice vector world map available on the Adobe Exchange site – it’s actually been available since 2002, but I only recently came across it. Most of the countries on the map are selectable and it’s free to download as an Adobe Illustrator file.

Magnum Photos have released an iPhone app of interest to Photography lovers. The Magnum Photos & Reporters Without Borders Album application lets you:

• Discover 101 legendary Magnum photos
• Complete your mosaic of images every week
• Select your favorite photos
• Behind each icon, discover the stories of legendaries photographs

It costs €2.99 for the app and there are some free image sets included.

Check out the Font Fabric site which has tons of free font goodness to download including this one called Dan (via Design Buzz).

If you’re working in the field or are a fan of caricature, you might be interested in the Sebastien Kruger workshop app. The App has 33 pages showing the work flow used to create a large Michael Jackson painting. According to the blurb on the the Artist Sketchbook pages;

From September 21-25, 2009 26 artists from 11 countries came to Barsinghausen/Germany to join Krüger’s 5th Painting Workshop. Sebastian Krüger gave 2 live presentations on large canvases (160 x 180 cm / about 71 x 98 in). Please enjoy Krüger’s workshop documentary which includes 31 working steps (photos) of his painting "Neverland calling," painted with acrylic on canvas.

You can buy the app here.

The Daily Drop Cap, if you haven’t seen it before, is a blog set up by typographer & illustrator Jessica Hirsche. She posts (almost) daily a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap which you can use for free in your personal blogs to make them even more lovely. Thank you to Jessica for making such beautiful typography available.

I’ve picked out a few of my favourites, click on the image to go the link for that letter and instructions on how to use it in your web page:

These are just a few of my faves, there are absolutely tons more on the Daily Drop Cap site.

On Saturday I attended Mulley Communications Online PR course in Dublin. I’m not a PR person but I found the course to be really useful from the point of view of someone running a small business and making and interacting with contacts online. The course was backed up with examples and links to lots of resources that are useful for anyone working online. This was the first run of the course and the modules covered were

• Basics of Online Comms
• Developing a Communications Bible
• Developing a Comms Philosophy
• Working with: Blogs, Forums, Twitter etc.
• Finding Tools – Who is talking about you online?
• Crisis Communications

Damien has posted up notes, images and video on two of the course modules on his blog:
1. Online Communications Guidelines/Philosophy
2. Crisis Communications

Thanks to Damien for a great day.

On a slightly related note, last year Mr. Mulley gave away some of his notes from his Blogging and Online Marketing course.  I did a little bit of graphic design work on the cover and layout of the notes. You can download both sets of notes below by clicking on the covers below:

Here’s a sample page from the Online Marketing set.

The Colophon website has a massive database of magazines from around the world. The directory has information and links to each magazine and in many cases has a number of  covers. On the downside the covers are a little bit small, but there are thousands of them to look at. Tons of graphic design inspiration from magazines on every topic under the sun.

(via Varoom Magazine)