Blogs that are accompanied by images are much more likely to grab your visitors’ attention than those that are only made of words. Images tend to act as mental tags which attach themselves to the body of your post and somehow force the reader to take a deeper look. Yet it can be hard to find images that are at once free of copyright limitations and original enough to make an impression on your readers.
Visit OldBookIllustrations.com for an unusual source of images for your blogs.
If you happen to run out of ideas and are looking for a source of images that are both unusual and free, you could do worse but take a trip down memory lane and grab an image from oldbookillustrations.com (OBI). The site is completely free and provides images lifted off old, copyright-free work of literature. You can think of OBI as Project Gutenberg for images.
The site is completely free and does not annoy visitors with trackers or obnoxious ads. It allows visitors to search for and freely download the images, using them any way they want, within the limits of the site’s terms of use. Visitors can search for illustrations by keyword, author, subject, date and various other criteria. The search functionality is a bit awkward, at least by modern standards, but it is nonetheless functional.
Most of the images it provides are monochrome line drawing. It’s worth keeping in mind that these illustrations were often meant to highlight specific “events” from a given story. They are artifacts from another era and often loaded with the cultural context they are drawn from (no pun intented).
With a little bit of imagination, combined with minimal technical skills, bloggers looking for unusual visuals or for a quick draft of inspiration can certainly do worse than looking up the OBI site, where they just might find something interesting to accompany their offer.
Need help finding original media to accompany your content? Give Backbay a shout!