Insider Info: istockphoto.com

At my job, I work heavily with the graphic development and content layouts of new websites. The stock photography service that our company mainly uses is istockphoto.com. They have a massive library of royalty free stock photography. However, anyone that deals with stock photos knows that they are not always cheap. In fact, when developing a multi-paged site or working with a larger scale collateral project (large brochure, etc.), photos can get down right expensive.

I know some of you are citing free photo services in your mind, but trust me, with a little bit of investigation into paid vs. free photo options, you can very quickly see the advantages to paid services. They just have more photos...not only that, they tend to be A LOT better conceptually and resolution-wise.

Now, as I stated before, even a more affordable option can still get expensive. However, istock has a neat little area called the "Dollar Bin". This area brings photo options ranging from 1-4 dollars for the various resolutions of any particular photo (higher resolutions of any one photo bring a higher price tag). For anyone interested in an affordable way to give their site a professional look and feel, this is amazing. Don't believe me? Take a look at the price tags on photos at places like Gettyimages. (I recently priced out ~$1800 for a client to use a handful of their images...for a year)

All and all, it's a good way to get your feet wet in terms of leveraging legal, professional imagery on the web or in print design.

Bonus Tip: most images you use on the web (about 90-95%) will be in the small-medium range. You shouldn't have to go larger than that (circumstantially of course). Print...that's a different story and the size of photo should be judged on a case by case basis.

Christmas Parties Are For Losers

Recently we had our office christmas party up at Sundance resort. Great place with classy people. The theme just happened to be Casino Royale. (I think Tasha [or T Kubb] made up for my frumpiness with her stellar looks.) The nights goal was to make as many chips as you can in 2 1/2 hours, then translate those chips into drawings for our raffle. Games: Bingo, Texas Hold 'Em, Black Jack, and Craps.

Tasha and I are regular Texas Hold 'Em players (free hold 'em players... :) ), and when we found out what the theme was, we thought it would be a good opportunity to put our 'skills' to the test....in the end, not the most strategic move we could do. We took the last two open seats at the hold 'em tables, which happened to be next to our CEO (photo: my left).

Now...it was not for lack of skill that I ended up left with only the shirt on my back (I had to fight for my pants), but a severely lucky hand. My betting strategy was perfect, but accounting for luck is apparently not a strong suit of mine, and 'all-in' really translated into 'all-out'.

While T Kubb won more than she lost (she's a great player), we ultimately walked away with about half the chips of when we started...my no chips didn't contribute too much.

Next year, given a similar party theme, I'm gonna stick with black jack...especially since most of the people that walked away from those tables hauled in a cool $40k (We each started with $1k). My new years resolution?...find and kill my bad luck.