So, at my current job I get to look at a lot of websites for inspiration. After trudging through thousands of sites, I have noticed a reoccurring theme. Well, not so much a theme, but a single picture. What is it with this woman? I have not only run into this picture on many sites, but numerous other pictures that appear all over the internet on professional sites.

You could quickly blame the top stock photo sites like istockphoto and shutterstock for commonly feeding people the same images. These sites however, have hundreds of thousands of photos. If this is the case, you would think their would be plenty of pictures to choose from that fit the need.

My guess is that people are just lazy. Even when using a stockphoto site with lots of images we still search for generic terms like “woman” or “girl”. While I am a big advocate of making people smarter, technology is supposed to BE smarter. It should be simple and straight forward for the user. I may be asking for too much here, but wouldn’t it be great if once a photo was downloaded that it was somehow kicked back on the search list?

I know this poses many problems. The best photographer shouldn’t be punished because everyone wants to use his photos. Also, these sites may already do something like this, but with so many sites out their what are the chances really of someone picking the same picture for their homepage as you? I guess this is something that the internet is going to run into for these budget projects who cannot hire a professional photographer or buy a photo that can only be used by them. I am just sick of seeing this woman.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Design Muse, Muse, Ponder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.