Beautiful photography will make a big impact on your site and across your social media. It makes everything look cohesive and well designed. When choosing stock photography I look for images that are visually interesting, have some texture, natural lighting and not too heavily filtered. Many stock photos look like a digital collage of items placed on a solid white background. They don’t look real, or natural because of the overuse of filters and improper lighting. Another peeve of mine is the stock photo that has cluttered, semi matchy items haphazardly placed on a white board, then photographed. It makes for a cluttered, uninspired image. Seeing a popular site use poor quality stock images recently is what lead to this post. This Spotlight will be the first in a new series of posts where I’ll share places to source things for your webdesign needs.

TwigyPost Love

One of my favorite places for stock photos is TwigyPosts. Each image literally checks off every single thing I look for when choosing images for clients or for personal use. Natural lighting, interesting textures & items, mixed with the perfect balance of colors. You can see the careful planning and time that goes into creating each image. The gorgeous Peonies in the Hello Darling home grid are TwigyPosts images. Below is an example of how you can take Jana’s gorgeous photos and create a unique image for your site.

The photo on the left is the original stock photo (minus my watermark of course). The image on the right was created in picmonkey and used as the featured post image. Start with a quality stock photo, then add layers that match your branding. When finished you will have a designer quality featured image for your site and social media that is unique to your brand.

For the Etsy Sellers

Many of you sell on Etsy and hopefully by now you have taken steps to update and beautify your new shop. One of the coolest new features of the etsy shop is the use of large custom banners. The banner spot is a key part of your visual branding and should be a high quality image. TwigyPosts offers Etsy Cover Photos that you can personalize (like the image above) to create a banner that looks designer quality. These images can also be used for the other branding spots throughout your etsy store and even in your social media for a seamless look.

The Love

Here is a sneak at some of the beautiful collections you can find in the TwigyPosts shop…