- You can preview your course images to make sure they meet the outlined guidelines.
- If you know you want/need to replace an image, you can select multiple options and place them in the collection before downloading, to see which one will best meet your needs. (We only want to download what we need.)
- It gives you a repository of images for future reference, if needed.
Most course imagery will be acquired from Shutterstock. The images requested in production documents are subject to change, based in the before mentioned guidelines. It's best practice to gather all your requested images into a collection, in Shutterstock, before downloading. Doing this gives you a few advantages:
Below are the steps to setting up and using image collections in Shutterstock. Click on each step to see specific instructions.
Before downloading, look up each image, click the little heart icon on the image and save it to a collection. If you don't have one set, you can make one and if you have one in existence, you can select it.
After you have saved all the course images to their collection, you can then view the collection as a whole.
Being able to see all this, before we download any images and use them in a course, will help us save both time and money, as well as increase the quality of our work by promoting thoughtful image choices.
In courses where there are multiple shapes, people, places or animals, downloading image sets can not only save time but it ensures a cohesive look throughout all the graphics used in the course.
Some courses have themed backgrounds that can be reused or cropped to be seen a different way. Others use “filler” images to add visual interest on a page, for example: a students hand writing on a piece of paper at the top of an assignment page. Repeating images like this can help provide consistency in page format but also reduces the number of images we download.
When downloading images, we only want to download what we are going to use, to ensure we don’t run out of images before the end of each month.
We currently have three plan types:
- 750 downloads per month
- 1,000 downloads per month
- 35 downloads per day
Always want to use the 35/day plan first, then the 750/month, followed by the 1000/month. Click on the above image to see where to access these plans in the Shutterstock layout.
Our entire team draws from this account, and we lose the 35/day if we do not use all of them.
As a reminder: Only download what you need and only for your work with Accelerate. Periodic audits will be performed, since we've had issues with this in the past.
Now that we've gone over how to gather our resources, let's move on to producing them. In the next several pages, we'll review some basics of color theory, accessibility and how to best produce web-ready graphics to be used in development.
