I often struggled, when I wanted to post (or just have a decent look at) image of some device or even piece of software. Internet is just plagued with tiny thumbnail-ish images. Even decent software’s icons can be hard to find (icons in my posts are getting hotlinked like crazy by lazy bastards).
Luckily there is a secret method I want to share. There is always one entity that desperately wants you to have images of awesome quality – manufacturer/developer.
Press and media kits
Any company that has a clue about press and online media wants to look good in there. This means they are happy to provide visual material about themselves and their products. Why are such caches of nice pics underknown? Because they are mostly buried in some corner of the site under official-sounding name like press materials or media kit.
Such sets of media usually include logos and product shots in multiple formats and with excellent quality and resolution.
Actual choice of materials also makes interesting tale of what company cares to tell the world about itself:
- Dropbox is proud of their software client for multiple platforms;
- Opera is also not shy to show software lineup, but also core personnel and some special features like Unite;
- Mozilla features Firefox prominently, but also has place for other software, special builds and even Labs features;
- Liquid Web is clearly in love with their data centers;
- WordPress fight for correctly looking logos (vanity much).
Alternatives
If there are no press materials available, there are some third party tools and sources that can often help:
- TinEye is excellent for finding originals and larger versions of smallish images;
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons have large amount of freely usable images, often in vector SVG format that scales excellently;
- Flickr has billions of images, many of which are licensed under Creative Commons, it can be great source of private photos and even modern spin of press kits from companies directly.
Overall
Have favorite gadget or software? Go look up their media kit and post links in the comments here. :)
Geek Squeaks’ of the Week (#77) « What's On My PC #