When you choose images for your website or digital product, it is essential to think about how your audience will perceive the images you select (or omit). Without intention around images and representation, you may unintentionally alienate part of your market.
When using images of people in your product or marketing content, those images should reflect the full range of diversity across your audience.
To consider your audience and their representation across your product and marketing content, you’ll need to reflect on the following:
- examples you describe
- photos or illustrations you use
- people who may be showcased as part of a video, podcast, event, or even the content writing team
A great way to get started with creating more inclusive content is to review your current content photography and illustration to confirm that the people shown in these images reflect the full diversity of your audience.
If you find that some of your audience is underrepresented, here are some excellent stock photography and illustration resources to help you update your existing content and plan your next update with inclusivity in mind.
Stock photography and illustration resources
Explore these 8 photography and illustration resources to bring more diversity and representation to your content.
Disability:IN
Disability:IN offers disability-inclusive stock photography to encourage corporations to use this in recruitment material, marketing material, internal and external communications, and more.
Affect the Verb: Disabled and Here
Disabled and Here is a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from a disabled perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).
Browse Diabled and Here photos
WOC in Tech Chat
The WOC in Tech community has shared a series of photos representing women of colour in tech. Their ask is that we use these images in pieces about entrepreneurs, software engineers, infosec professionals, IT analysts, marketers, and other people who make up the tech ecosystem in order to show a different representation of all women in tech.
Black Illustrations
Black Illustrations includes both free and paid illustrations of Black people across a variety of categories such as business, design, disability, LGBTQ+, and more.
Tonl
Tonl offers a paid collection of culturally diverse stock photos that represent the true world we live in.
Nappy
Nappy offers a free collection of beautiful photos of Black and Brown people.
The Gender Spectrum Collection
The Gender Spectrum Collection is a non-commercial, free stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.
The Noun Project
The Noun Project has a series of photo collections offered for free with attribution or with a paid commercial license. Their collections include Diversity in Tech and more.
Browse Diversity in Tech photos
Pexels
While not exclusively providing underrepresented photos and topics, Pexels has been growing its diversity, accessibility, Black, pride, and other collections by working with many creators from diverse backgrounds.
Create more inclusive products and services
We offer a wealth of insight and expertise on inclusive design and delivering more inclusive products, services, and educational experiences. Reach out for the latest insights and to explore how we can work together to realize the bottom-line benefits of designing for market diversity.