Below are some tools that can help you create professional-looking graphics to add to your poster.
This catalog contains photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.
A collection of over a thousand images of significant historical interest scanned at high-resolution
Search from this page for images and other resources from government agencies. Most are in the public domain.
The USDA has over 120,000 images of animals, transportation, Americana, and many other categories.
NASA offers images and other multimedia resources, most of which are in the public domain.
If you use images from the web, make sure you are not breaking copyright law. You can ask permission from the source or use images that are licensed as Creative Commons. In addition, government images usually fall in the public domain and are free from copyright.
If you borrow images you didn't create that are not creative commons or public domain, they are most likely protected by copyright or you will need to get permission by the original creator to use them.
You will need to attribute all image that are not yours or not in the public domain.
Example CC-licensed image with attribution below:
"Poster Presentation at MMSNF 2013 Workshop" by Argonne National Laboratory is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
A good rule of thumb is to use the acronym TASL, which stands for Title, Author, Source, License.
Lastly, is there anything else I should know before I use it?
These best practices are based on actual CC license requirements. Noting the title is a requirement of all CC licenses version 3.0 or earlier, optional for 4.0. Noting the author, source, license, and retaining any extra notices is a requirement of all CC licenses. See Devil in the details.
Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
A collective of institutions that have uploaded publicly held photography collections. Images found in Flickr Commons site have “No Known Copyright Restrictions."
You can limit your results to creative commons by selecting "labeled for reuse" under usage rights.
A media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content, including images, sounds and videos.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
An open-access database of image collections shared by institutional users of Shared Shelf.
Providing access to the visual collections of the Wellcome Library, which documents "2000 years of human culture" with a focus on biomedical imagery. Most images are open access, with others available for paid licensing.
Artstor Images for Academic Publishing (IAP)
The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge.
The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
Stock photos are a great way to add a visual element to your poster without having to worry about copyright infringement. Double-check that you are filtering your images by the appropriate license (i.e. that you have permission to use the image without gaining the consent of the original creator first). Remember, just because it is free to use does not mean that you do not have to cite the image! Be sure to use appropriate style and citation formatting for images.
It's important that images you use represent the wide range of users you intend to reach. But if you've ever used a search engine like Google, Unsplash, or Pixabay to search for images of people (a student, doctor, teacher, etc...), you may have noticed that the majority of images are of white, able-bodied people.
Certain searches, like "IT worker," also tend to have an extreme gender bias. And visibly queer people are scarcely pictured in image search results. While search engines have gotten better at increasing representation in recent years, largely thanks to the critiques of scholars like Safiya Noble, they still have a long way to go.
Because of the deficit of diverse images in standard image search engines, many groups have created their own image databases to increase the diversity of representation in stock photos. The following resources all provide free-use images centering people who share a particular identity.
#WOCinTech Chat started out as a Twitter chat and quickly evolved into an initiative to connect and empower WOC in the tech world. As part of this work they put together a photo shoot of real WOC technologists at work. The stock photos are meant to combat the idea that there are no WOC in the tech industry by increasing their visibility.
Can We All Go, a company that focuses on increasing the accessibility of spaces for people of all sizes and abilities, created this free stock photo collection "of plus-size people doing normal things" to address a lack of inclusion of fat bodies in existing stock photo collections.
The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.
This collection is a disability-led effort to provide free and inclusive stock photos shot from our own perspective, featuring disabled BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) across the Pacific Northwest.
If you were to type in the word ‘coffee’ on Unsplash, you’d rarely see a cup of coffee being held by black or brown hands. It’s the same result if you type in terms like ‘computer’ or ‘travel.’ You may find an image or two but they’re pretty rare. But black and brown people drink coffee too, we use computers, and we certainly love traveling. And that’s why we launched nappy; to provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else. Nappy makes it easy for companies to be purposeful about representation in their designs, presentations, and advertisements.
PICONI is a coop of stock image photography. We recognize that most other FREE stock image sites have very few or no images of people of color. We sought out to create a space where publishers, bloggers, website owners, marketers, designers, graphic artists, advertisers and the like can easily search and find diverse multi-racial images.
Getty Images: The Disability Collection
Getty Images, the NDLA (National Disability Leadership Alliance) and the technology company Oath launched this new subcategory on Getty Images. The collection aims to show that people with disabilities live full lives, they are not imprisoned by the disability they have, they work, spend time with friends, laugh, play and enjoy life. You can contribute to the collection https://www.gettyimages.com/workwithus. Open Source.
Open access. UKBlackTech supports, promotes, represents and encourages the continued growth of diverse innovators and tech innovation across the UK. We work with institutions, industry, local businesses and communities to solve these challenges. To build a great tech eco-system we need to see equity, transparency and representation at the cutting edge of tech.
To have better inclusivity of diverse patient populations, here are some links to open-source resources to provide a better range of skin tones and ailment presentations.
Interprofessional Health Sciences Library. (n. d.). Representation in medicine [LibGuide]. Seton Hall
University. https://library.shu.edu/representation/SkinOfColor
