Diversify your visuals

Inclusivity begins with imagery

This post focuses on resources for expanding the diversity of the images you use. If you have additional resources to suggest, please leave a comment so others can benefit from your additional suggestions. Thanks for reading & sharing.

Black Illustrations

Black Illustrations has hundreds of diverse images you can use in your publishing projects. If you don’t have a budget for illustrations, this set of images is free for personal or commercial use. Use them in a newsletter or blog, on sites, in presentations, or anywhere else. 

The Centre for Aging Better has a collection of photos showing people over 50 in age-positive ways, as well as people with different physical abilities. There are also icons. Thanks to Howard Lake’s Graphic Traffic News for originally pointing me to this resource.

Photo by Elliot Manches for the The Centre for Aging Better

Customize your visuals

Customize an illustration on blush.design by adjusting poses, backgrounds, and the number of characters. (Screenshot from blush.design)

Humaaans has a gorgeous diverse collection of illustrations by Pablo Stanley, artist and CEO of Blush.

Blush hosts a growing library of free illustrations you can customize. Adjust the number of characters in a scene, alter poses, or change the background. It’s then easy to download the adapted visuals.

Screenshot of Humaaan, a resource for free customizable illustrations

Free Illustrations links out to a variety of collections of diverse illustrations. That’s where I found this collection of 10 diverse 3d avatars from avatarz, which has a fuller suite of 8,000 available for $49.

3d avatars available from Avatarz

Diversify your image sources

• This Pexels collection of body diversity images curated by Lisa Fotios includes 84 photos and 16 videos

• Openverse lets you search more than 500 million Creative Commons-licensed photos. Formerly Search.CreativeCommons.org, it’s now an open-source project hosted by Wordpress.

• Black Women Photographers highlights the work of black women and non-binary photographers. This month the site is hosting a print sale to support its independent artists. #HireBlackWomenPhotographers

• Flickr’s photo collection of Women of Color in Tech #WOCinTech is available free under a Creative Commons license.

• Nappy.co features free images that have collectively been downloaded a million times.

Here’s how Nappy.co’s founders describe their rationale for launching the site:

“…If you were to type in the word ‘coffee’ on Unsplash [ed note: Unsplash hosts one of the most popular collections of free images online], you’d rarely see a cup of coffee being held by black or brown hands. It’s the same result if you type in terms like ‘computer’ or ‘travel.’ You may find an image or two but they’re pretty rare. But black and brown people drink coffee too, we use computers, and we certainly love traveling.

And that’s why we launched nappy; to provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else. Nappy makes it easy for companies to be purposeful about representation in their designs, presentations, and advertisements…”

More from Wonder Tools

• Organize your images with an under-appreciated app called Eagle

• Jumpstart your journal — 10 kinds of journaling, from paper to Day One

• Make a creative video with ease with Kapwing & other video editors

• Try a robotic writing assistant called Copy.ai

Get a personalized reading list

If you want a curated guide to the best stories of the day from a broad range of outlets, try Refind. I described the gist of how it works in a prior post. Get a personal digest customized for the topics you’re interested in.

Build your own thing in 2022

Building your own newsletter, podcast or niche site in 2022? Apply to join the 100-day online Journalism Creators Program I direct at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Reply to this post if you have questions.

Join me for a live audio chat on Twitter @ 2pm ET Thursdays

I host weekly live audio conversations. Join me on Twitter @jeremycaplan Today, Feb 3, 2022 I’ve invited educators from around the world to talk about tactics and tools for teaching. Join us to listen in, or to optionally add your voice to the conversation.

I’m aiming to expand my own image awareness and use so please leave a comment if you have other resources to recommend.