SEARCH CRITERIA
FROM PASTEUP TO PIXELS
In my career I’ve seen a good deal of change, from paste-up to computers, from ad film to PDFs, from transparencies to online images. I remember when Comstock was just about the ONLY game in town.
I’ve also worked on all sides of the clip art/royalty-free/rights-managed image business—from buying images to designing catalogs. So, you’d think with all this exposure and experience I’d have learned a thing or two about finding images. Not much.
THE ZERO EFFECT
One of my favorite movie lines is super sleuth Daryl Zero’s [“Zero Effect”, 1998] explanation of looking for things.
“Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.” [Italics mine]
THE GOOGLE EFFECT
I’ll bet everyone remembers the first time they did an online search and got 4,879,324 results—numbers so high the search becomes virtually useless. Jupiterimages advertises, “More than 50 brands and millions of images”, so what are we designers to do when an image search nets 12,771 images? Look at every single one? That’s what I do...sometimes.
DUMBING DOWN DESIGN
World-class designers may have design epiphanies in which the perfect concept conceives the perfect photo shoot, which in turn gives birth to the perfect photo, but many of us don’t have the resources—or our clients don’t have the resources—to do this, so we use royalty-free or occasionally rights-managed images.
This is not a proletariat rant against the “haves”. I’ve met many world-class designers and they are to a person smart, passionate, and hard working, but they aren’t going to be designing Joe’s Manufacturing Company’s latest brochure. But I digress.
THE ULRICH EFFECT?
In spite of the fact that my search criteria may net me 12,771 images, finding the "perfect" image can be impossible, because “When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad.” So occasionally I back up, loosen my visual expectations, set aside a few hours or more [the hard part] and scan every single image.
This is a backwards—I know—and it doesn’t work in every case. Non-concept driven pieces are less susceptible to The Goggle Effect, so if all you need is a photo of a smiling person on the phone—that’s easy. But finding an image to illustrate the concept of say “patience” is tougher—time for The Zero Effect
OK I MAY BE INSANE
DGM Art Director Kathie thinks I’m nuts. She’ll [wo]man-handle the search criteria to eliminate 12,752 of the images. I do that too and it works, but sometimes—for whatever reason—I choose “[to] go looking for anything at all, [because my] chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, [I’m] sure to find some of them.”
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