Teach42

My blog posts tend to be fairly text heavy, but one thing I’d been trying to do in recent months is to add a little color to them by including images. Without a doubt, there’s no better way to grab someone’s attention than by incorporating an image that piques one’s curiosity. Considering that most of your audience is most likely going to be exhibiting more characteristics of digital natives than immigrants, it bears considering the fact that natives tend to prefer multiple modes of media, and will gravitate to visual media before written.

There are four types of images that you may typically use in a blog post: Screenshots, logos/icons, photos and mashups.

Screenshots are typically used for demonstration purposes. If you’re using a mac, it’s incredibly easy to get screengrabs as the tools are built right into the operating system. On a PC, you need to work at it just a bit more. You’ll need a third party tool to make it easy, and personally I recommend Jing if you don’t want to spend any money. If you don’t mind spending a few bucks, I think Snagit is one of the best, most comprehensive screen capturing apps out there. I’ve never regretted buying it. Either way, screen captures can be incredibly helpful when trying to describe the steps you’re taking to do something, or if you’re discussing a particular feature in an application. Why waste words describing it when you can just be more effective and just show it to them?

The second type is logos and icons, which can be useful when you’re referencing a specific tool, program or website. There may be times where people don’t recognize the name, but they recognize the logo or icon immediately. Even if they do recognize the name, sharing the logo itself in image form can raise all sorts of associations in a readers mind that may not be evoked by just the name. For example, some people get confused when I say I work for Discovery, thinking that it’s a brand of children’s toys or maybe even the Discover Card. However, if they see the Discovery logo on my business card, there’s no question in anyone’s mind anymore. Everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Next up is mashups. I guess I’m using this as a generic term, meaning anytime you’re doing actual customizations of an image. This could mean that you’re creating a graph/chart like Kathy Sierra did, or just marking up screenshots for emphasis and direction like Sue Waters does so effectively. Either way, even when you can’t find the perfect image, you can’t go wrong by making one. If you want to create your own quick and easy graphs, one of my personal favorite sites is CrappyGraphs.com. Yes, I know the name is awful, but it’s a wonderful tool for creating a quick and easy graph when the point you’re trying to make is more important that specific data plots. As for marking up images, I’d personally go back to Jing. For both windows and mac, it does a great job of capturing a part of the screen, uploading it to a server and allowing you to mark it up before you embed it into your blog post. Highly recommended.

Which brings us to photos. Unfortunately, when most people want a photo, they simply go to Google Images and… well, for lack of a better term, ‘steal’ a photo. Even if you cite where you got it, if you don’t have permission to make use of it then you’re breaking the rules. This is such a shame, considering how many places there are to get high quality images that you actually have the rights to use!! I’m just going to share two of my favorites. Of course I’m going to mention Flickr, but not just Flickr in general, rather the Creative Commons section. There are literally millions of photos that you can use there that you can choose based on the rights you need. If you need to modify the image (crop, markup, recolor), then be sure to choose one that allows derivatives. If you need one that you can use for commercial purposes (incorporated into a fund raiser of some sort perhaps), be sure to chose images that allow commercial usage. But otherwise, there are nearly 30 million Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs photos for you to choose from. Not so bad at all. However, if that isn’t enough, one of my favorite sites for images, both for blogs and for presentations, is the Stock.xchng. This is high quality, stock photography that is available for the rock bottom price of… free. These images are truly professional photos that people have shared and are perfect for including into blog posts. The only trouble is that they tend to be rather large, so you’ll need to resize them if your blogging engine doesn’t do it for you (many do at this point tho).

So today’s challenge, in case you didn’t get the ‘picture’ yet (nyuk nyuk) is to incorporate an image into your next blog post.

Do you generally use images in your blog posts? Or do you know of someone who you think does this pretty well on a regular basis? If so, share a link!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License