Copyright, Copyleft, Copy Commons

Posted by Teeg on November 6th, 2007 filed in Business, CC, Clipart, Copyleft, Copyright free, Free, Graphic art, Public Domain

I love doing graphic art. It didn’t take me long at all, after I got my first digital camera, to realize that was where my passion was. So, while my husband was walking around with his camera trying to take the perfect picture of a duck taking off from the water or catching the beauty of a bed of tulips, I was setting up my tripod and catching pictures of waffles or frying pans or pointing it up at the sky and taking a shot so I’d have the perfect color of blue later.

Lately as I’ve been working on web designs, I’ve had an excuse to do more graphic art work…and one thing I noticed quickly was that it’s really nice to know where to look for copyright-free, copyleft, public domain, or certain creative commons material to use. To that end, I’m working on a list of places to find free artwork. Some of these will be traditional picture sites, but the pictures can be from any site, as long as they are free to use for any purpose.

Here is one I found this morning, while looking for a “thumb up” picture: http://www.wpclipart.com/index.html.

From the page: “WPClipart is a collection of high-quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors,
and optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. There are thousands of color graphic clips
as well as hundreds of illustrations and photographs. As of Sunday, 11/04/2007 there are 18,931 images.”

As a side note, if you are looking for architectural details or maps, add .gov to your search terms. All (or nearly all) government documents are in the public domain, and free for commercial or non-commercial use.

Do you know of a good, free site that you use for images? Share the link, and I’ll add it to the list.

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