Fast food nation
Posted by Keith Tan in Creative, Web 2.0 on June 24th, 2008
As an interactive agency, we’re fortunate to be in the business during a time when the Internet is aggressively stamping its authority as the most pervasive form of media ever.
The Internet is a great field leveler, enabling smaller agencies like ours to compete with the big boys with larger teams and fancier coffee machines.
Websites such as iStockphoto and to a lesser extent, Template Monster (yikes! did I say that?) have revolutionized the way the industry works. These sites sell digital media files such as website templates, icons, photos, illustrations, videos and flash animations at low prices, enabling our designers to whip up visualizations and mockups quickly and effectively.
Want an image of a sunny beach resort? Or even a 1960s retro Caribbean-styled illustration of a tropical palm tree? You can almost swear by your grandmother’s grave that you’ll find it on one of these sites.
iStockphoto is one of the pioneers of microstock photography. They became a significant enough player to be bought out by industry giants Getty in 2006. Beyond offering low cost access to their stockpile (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun!), they successfully built a large and active community of independent contributors. This enabled them to provide an unrivalled range of files for sale, at a very good refresh rate. From just photos, they now offer almost all types of digital media files. In May this year, they announced that a new stock audio service would be available in September 2008.
With the ease of browsing and shopping online, coupled with access to an amazing range of design work from designers all over the world, we may be witnessing yet another paradigm shift in the creative industry.
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