And speaking of directing art, tell me your trade secrets!
- Where do you go to find free or nonspendy photographs?
- How do you get ideas for photographs to illustrate stories that are, let’s say, totally and completely nonvisual? Are there tricks you use when you’re wholly uninspired?
- How do you find that photo that you know exists but that’s just refusing to come up, no matter what keywords you use to search for it?
- Where do you go to find illustrators?
- How much guidance do you give to illustrators—to what extent do you just let them do their arty thing?
- Do you generally deal with agencies or go directly to the artists?
We’ve mostly been using Creative Commons–licensed Flickr images, Associated Press photos, Photofest, Mary Evans Picture Library (which doesn’t seem to work with Firefox on the Mac—grrr), cheap stock places like iStockPhoto, behemoths such as Corbis and Getty, and specialty archives such as USHMM. I’ve recently started trawling through the listings at PhotoServe, but I haven’t yet used anything from any of the agencies I found there. I’d also somehow never heard of the mega-agency Jupiter until last week.
We haven’t hired any illustrators yet, but we’d love to. Some illustration agencies I’ve been looking at are CIA and Riley. Also, the DrawMo! del.icio.us dump. Any advice or recommendations are welcome (the only illustrations I’ve ever commissioned in the past are maps for fantasy books; I’m not sure that’s the look we want).
Heeeeelp meeeeeee!
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