Hey and welcome back.
We're going to be talking about visual assets now, I promise you, visual assets will be a part of
every single project you work on, whether it's imagery, illustrations or iconography.
Sometimes your clients may come to you with assets of their own.
And the ugly truth is sometimes they're really bad.
It's something that we got to learn how to navigate.
But let's get into something else.
Projects and deadlines, just sometimes they move so quick and you don't have that budget to hire a
photographer or even hire an illustrator.
And that sucks.
But if you do have a budget and if you do have the time, please do hire a photographer.
It does make a world of difference, especially even with illustrators as well.
Please hire them if you do have that budget and that time.
So sometimes you do get lucky, sometimes you have amazing assets to work with, whether they're good
photography like this, this is something I quickly put together with on Splash.
But if your client comes to you with something like this, this is something that's great to work with.
Maybe they've had good photography done beforehand, maybe some illustration and iconography.
I feel like iconography is never really the problem on this list.
They generally trust a product designer.
You desire to do what's best.
And the other scenario is that you're not so lucky.
You may get stock photos.
You know, stock photos are horrible.
Some of them are OK, but most of them are bad.
And please don't ever use them.
This is the moment you should really sit down with your client or product team or both and talk about
ways you can improve on that because anything is really better than this.
Now, there are a couple of resources that can help you.
I really love using Unspotted.
You can use your website or you can use the Sigma plugin, which we'll get into later.
Now, this is totally free and you don't need to really credit anyone.
All the images on here you can just use and you can also just search by keyword.
You can search randomly, you can search by category.
They have a great like foundry of imagery.
And some of it's really amazing actually for illustrations.
I love using Sigma plugins like Blush Illustrations and as humans.
So these are really great.
This is blush over here.
It will allow you to kind of mix and match some illustrations.
The only thing is it's paid.
But you can get a good sense of, if you like, an illustration and want to use it later.
This is called humans.
This is another plugin that allows you to kind of piece together different types of scenarios you can
use, like a head, whatever shirt you want, and we'll get into that as well.
And illustrations is another fun one.
You'll get the SVG as well as for Fagerberg.
And this is what's really great and you can go out and buy illustrations as well.
But sometimes they do get expensive.
So I suggest using something like this and seeing where you can go from there for icons.
I love using material icons.
They're easy to use.
The website's easy to use.
You can pick out whatever you want, whether the themes are filled, outlines, rounded, tutone or
sharp.
You have the ability to just search by whatever keyword you want and you can easily grab an icon and
upload that into.
Sigma Sigma also has several plug ins that will go over.
One is called Icona Find the other one.
They do have a material design plug in that we can use as well.
So let's jump right into Sigma and I'll show you how to work with different types of imagery and illustration
and icons.