Now, let's do a fun exercise where you go and hunt some stock photos. In this Figma file, 1
I have prepared 3 frames with headlines and descriptions of three businesses. 2
I've actually grabbed text from real businesses and their websites. 3
I want you to find an appropriate photo for each frame, imagining that you are designing their home page 4
and you need a photo for the hero section. 5
You're not designing in this assignment. So don't worry about the format. 6
Doesn't matter if the image is going to go in the background, as a split-screen or any other way. 7
The goal is just to pick an image thoughtfully. 8
You can choose photos from any of these free or paid photo sites be it Unsplash, Pexels, iStock or 9
any other site. 10
Finding the right photo for your project actually takes time. And sometimes you need to look on several 11
sites to really nail it down. 12
I sometimes can spend a couple hours searching for the right photo just for one hero section. 13
You can use paid sites too and just grab samples from there, without paying for it. 14
You can screenshot or download watermarked image. Big stock, for example, has a Download Preview link 15
and you can use that sample image. 16
Don't worry about the quality, format or the size of the image. 17
But I do want you to use only stock photo sites and not Google or any other place, where they have strict 18
copyright rules on their images. like Flickr, or grabbing someone's photo from Facebook. 19
And for each photo that you pick, I want you to explain why you chose the photo. 20
This is how you get into habit of design thinking. You will do much better job and have your employers 21
happier, when you put thought behind each of your decisions. 22
I'll do an example right here. 23
First step, is to understand what is the business about and what is it that they are offering. 24
Then think about what sort of scene we want to set on the website 25
given the business and the text. 26
So this business, helps other companies measure their employee happiness. 27
This sort of gives me an idea, that showing happy employees would work well for this frame. 28
Let's head to our sites and start by searching quite literally for happy employees. 29
All 3 of them returned quite diverse results. And as you can see, Bigstock being the paid site, has 30
returned significantly more number of results than Unsplash and Pexels. Also, the results are quite different. 31
Bigstock although having a lot of results has a lot of old, trashy photos like this lame business 32
people here. Unsplash, actually, doesn't have a good search and keyword mapping. 33
As you can see, it has returned a lot of irrelevant stuff. Pexels seems to have done a decent job. 34
When you do the search experiment with different sort of keywords. Sometimes literal key phrase like 35
"happy employees" will work, but often it's going to be better to use and mix and match single keywords. 36
For example, in this case, I do want the scene to be set in an office environment that's sort of a hard 37
keyword that needs to be present in the scene, so I can just use office. And then some secondary keywords 38
it, like smile, happy and so on. 39
Here's a pro tip, when you see a photo that has a quality that you like, but it's still not exactly the 40
right scene or the model. 41
Find 42
who is the contributor and searching within their photos. 43
For example, I quite like the quality of this photo. Under copyright 44
there is a link of the contributor. Meaning a photographer or the photo studio who uploaded this 45
photo on the site. 46
If you click on this link, then you'll see all other photos from this contributor. 47
And now look at this. 48
Much better results than a generic search. 49
All stock sites have their own ways to display contributor photos and where to find the link, but most of 50
them do. And their own ways to search through the images of one contributor. On Bigstock just insert 51
your keyword in front of this short code that it automatically inserted. 52
This will refine results within the contributors photos. 53
Without this trick, I would have to go through thousands of terrible photos. 54
This is a pretty good option for happy employees. 55
Click Download Preview and then just place it inside the Figma file. 56
That's all. 57
No need to design anything, leave it as is. It shows happy employees, which is the goal of this business, 58
the photo is modern, 59
the atmosphere feels relaxed. 60
Smiles look genuine and overall the photo feels warm and inviting. And done. 61
That's your task. 62
No design involved. 63
Have fun.