h/t to Cara North for resurrecting this blog post from 2017 titled, “Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online” by Jennifer Gonzalez. It’s full of tips for creating or using images. I love how she starts with the obvious (but underutilized) option of making your own!
When I teach instructional material design courses, I make the highly unpopular requirement that ALL media used in course deliverables must be your own work. It’s not rare to have a back and forth starting with “What do you mean by ALL media? It’s ok to use found images, right?” Or, to get an email informing me this requirement to create original media is just simply not the way it’s done in the “real world” where the important skill is “curation versus creation” of resources, or that design teams include developers so it’s not necessary to know how to create images, or reminders about “fair use”, or links to these things called “open educational resources”.
However, beyond my objective to have designers learn how to either create (or more likely prototype) images they want in a design, I also hope to convey that randomly “cut and pasted” images peppered throughout the instructional materials from multiple sources usually looks terrible – and often far worse than trying to create something original. That said, I agree it’s important to know where and how to use the images of others – as I do throughout this blog in my Featured Image photo. Therefore, the key is to know how (and when) to BOTH curate AND create.