90% Of Designers Make This Mistake With Stock Photos. Here’s The Solution.

Finally, here’s my first newsletter. It took me some time, but I plan to be more consistent in the future. So let’s start with a popular topic.

I’m glad that we have finally gotten over using ‘Lorem ipsum’ and repetitive images on the UIs we make. It’s clear that how we showcase our designs matters just as much as the awesome experiences we build.

High-quality, realistic presentations go a long way in showing what an interface is really capable of.

We all love unsplash.com and pexels.com, so much so that we’ve gotten a bit lazy. I totally get the excitement, but we need to take the next step.

There are 2 major problems with those Unsplash portraits

1. Most of them are unrealistically high-quality studio portraits, and, in a real-life scenario, most users don’t have such superficially perfect portraits. They just feel fake.

2. As any platform with a search-first discovery, Unsplash is optimized to show the best-performing stock images when you search for “man”, “woman” or “portrait”. As a result, a lot of designers will just pick some good-looking ones from the first 20–30 photos. And then, hundreds of design concepts show the same photos. They feel repetitive. They don’t feel unique. And we, as designers, do want to create somewhat unique interfaces.

Behold ↓

I may be exaggerating a bit, but it’s clear that being a pro at picking the right content is essential.

When it comes to text, ChatGPT is an absolute rock star, but the real trick is knowing whether what it generates is hitting the mark. ChatGPT and all the generative AI tools are only as good as your ability to judge whether their output is spot on or if it needs further iterations.

Now back to our stock photos. Fortunately, there are some solutions.

Solution #1: Filter for new photos (Free)

You actually have an option on Unsplash to show the newest entries first. This seems like a nice workaround, the only drawback is that it sometimes doesn’t give you as accurate pictures as the basic, ‘sort-by-relevance’ option. But it’s something worth experimenting with.

Solution #2: AI-generated images (Free)

✨ The real deal.

I really think this is the best workaround. This ticks every box:

• These images are 100% unique. No other concept will ever use the same picture.

• No need to stress about licensing or privacy concerns because these people do not really exist. So they are perfectly cut to live inside your design concepts (although, who knows, there might be some legal tweaks in the future given the gray area of source material usage, but that’s not a concern for now.)

• They are the perfect blend of amateur and professional. Which is highly realistic.

You might find other similar websites as well, but the idea is the same.

Solution #3: AI-generated images (Paid)

Midjourney has become the most accurate and powerful image generator. If you do some digging and experiment with it, you will be able to generate custom characters tailored to your exact needs. You can also generate multiple perspectives for the same person. Which is pretty impressive.

Naturally, this level of customization takes a bit more time and effort. For a quick fix to populate your designs with realistic images, I’d still recommend the other two options, but for something more advanced, Midjourney is definitely a great option.

Thanks for reading my article.
I hope you learned something from it.
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