Design Rule 2

Principles of Design
Rule 2



		Don't Steal Graphics There are still many, many sites out there that give away free graphics for use on a web page. Some designers ask that you put a link back to their page if you use their graphics, while others make their art available with no strings attached. If you want personalized graphics, learn to use an image-editing program (or find someone who can make them for you). Go to Yahoo! under Arts: Design Arts: Graphic Design: Web Page Design and Layout: Graphics to find a huge index of pages that offer free web graphics. One of my favorite sources for page design graphics is Jelene's Free Web Graphics. Instead of putting up a bunch of unrelated buttons and icons, Jelene has coordinated sets of backgrounds, buttons, bullets, and other art that you can use throughout your site to create a theme. Using related elements throughout your site gives it a much more professional, pulled-together look than what results after sticking in a bunch of mismatched graphics, no matter how attractive they are individually. Another source of amazing digital images is NASA's Multimedia Gallery. They're not copyrighted, so you can use them however you wish. Hey, we taxpayers paid for them, didn't we? The caveat here is that you cannot use the actual NASA logo and insignia unless you are an employee of NASA. See their Guidelines for more information on proper use of NASA images.