11 Best Resources For The Perfect Visual Content
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8.25 seconds.
In just 15 years, our attention span has decreased by nearly 33% from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds.
As attention spans continue to decrease, businesses are faced with the challenge of finding new and unique ways of engaging their customers.
From simple tips and tricks to detailed white papers, there is no shortage of ideas when it comes to creating content intended to capture share of mind.
Sometimes, though, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to stay relevant.
Visual content such as images, gifs, videos, and illustrations should be a core part of your brand strategy if you want to keep your customers coming back for more.
Why?
Visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text
Research shows that colored and eye-catching visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%
Fortunately for you, we’ve prepared our list of the 11 best resources for the perfect visual content that will make your life easier and your content more engaging.
Stock vs. custom and who needs what
Before we share our list of the 11 best resources for visual content, it is important to understand that there is a major difference between stock and custom visual content.
Stock content is content that has been created without any specific business or brand in mind.
It can be sourced for free or for a fee and is recommended for startups and lower-budget brands.
Custom content is content that is created specifically for a single business or brand.
It requires brand guidelines, art direction, photography and/or videography to capture and edit your content.
It is recommended for any size business looking to scale their operations through branding efforts.
Pro Tip: No matter where you are in your brand-building process, it is critical you adhere to the voice and visual identity of your brand. Using stock content that is not aligned can negatively impact your perception among customers.
11 best resources for the perfect brand-building visual content
Save yourself from wasting time on the internet looking for visual content with these 11 resources:
1. Giphy
GIFs are short looping videos without sound that are useful if you’re looking for something highly engaging that makes your brand more fun and relatable.
For all things GIF, Giphy has an amazing library.
Just type what you’re looking for and thousands of GIFs will pop up.
There’s also the option of searching for GIFs under specific usernames in the event you find an author you love.
You can be your own designer and create a custom GIF as well.
Pro Tip: Head to Giphy when brainstorming an idea. You might find something that sparks inspiration for your marketing strategy.
2. Pexels
Pexels is an excellent resource for free visual content offering a huge library of great quality stock photos, vectors, illustrations, and even videos.
On Pexels, you’ll find over 500,000 free images with artists uploading roughly 50,000 new images per month and unique search functionality such as color.
If you want to tell a visual story through your pictures, go check out Pexels.
3. Unsplash
Unsplash is another great resource for free stock images with over 200,000 contributing photographers and a library of over 2 million photos.
Unsplash is unique in that photographers upload their photos and then a team of photo editors curates them, which encourages photographers to submit more frequently and offers you a better final product.
4. Burst
Burst is also another resource that offers thousands of free stock photos for both commercial and personal use.
Powered by Shopify, you can search for images based on themes and topics.
Burst’s library contains some incredibly beautiful and unique photos that can enhance your visual message.
They also offer the ability to subscribe to an email where you will be given first access to newly uploaded content.
5. Adobe Stock
Adobe stock must be one of the most exhaustive resources of visual content and is used frequently at NiceDay.
It has everything from pictures to vectors to music to videos and more.
Adobe Stock is a freemium website meaning that while you can get some images for free, most are paid for.
We suggest starting with their free stock photos, vectors, and videos to get a feel for their visual content before upgrading.
Pro Tip: Adobe has some of the best customer service in the business. If you’re on a budget but need content, reach out to them directly to see if they can create a custom deal for you. Odds are they will look to offer some sort of discount.
6. Shutterstock
Shutterstock is a great resource for professional designers and visual content makers.
With over 350 million royalty-free photos, vectors, and illustrations, they’ve got one of the largest libraries for everything visual.
Shutterstock, however, does not offer any free content.
Their prices start at $29 a month for 10 assets and climb to $199 per month for 750 assets.
They also offer on-demand packs which allow you to access a specific number of assets when you need them and without commitment.
7. Canva
With Canva on the scene, visual content just got better.
Canva is a platform used to create graphics, presentations, posters, and other types of visual content.
It offers a constantly growing library of templates that can be used for almost every platform: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, presentations, and more.
Feeling creative?
You can also create your own visuals from their library of graphics, photos, and fonts.
While there is a free version available, the premium version will give you access to more templates and resources and comes at a super affordable price of $9.99 per month when you sign up for a year.
8. Visme
Visme is the go-to for creating engaging presentations, infographics, and visual reports. Think of it as a way to take boring data and transform it into a visually engaging story.
Quite like Canva, you can also design social media graphics, pins, eBook covers, create videos, and more on the platform.
9. Prezi
Another website to enhance your presentations is Prezi. Prezi adds life to your presentation with its interactive videos. Plus, they are quite easy to make.
The website has a free version that is limited in its ability and climbs to an affordable $15 per month for the Plus subscription.
10. Freepik
Freepik is a resource for high quality content such as illustrations, photos, vector images and PSD files.
While there is a free version, the available content is limited so we recommend signing up for their premium model which starts at $14.99 with no extended commitment, or $9.99 per month for 12 months.
11. Drawkit
If it’s illustrations you are looking for, you might want to check out Drawkit.
You’ll find illustrations based on specific topics all of which are hand-drawn.
For those of you that need some custom content, we love their request feature where you can both request and vote on illustrations you’d like created next.
Start getting visual with your content
These websites are guaranteed to improve your visual content and have your competition bookmarking you for inspiration.
Don’t forget that when creating visual content for your brand, staying true to your identity is critical.
Ready to step outside of the stock content and into custom visuals? That’s our jam. Get in touch with us to talk all things visual.
