Stock In Action

Whether you are using stock for a freelance client, your work, or your own business there is one important rule you must follow: Don’t let your design look like you used stock! Everything should look custom, nothing should look canned. Does that mean you need to pay hundreds of dollars for a model and a photographer to get that perfect picture of a friendly receptionist for you contact page? No, it means you need to follow a few simple steps to make it look like you did.

1. Don’t buy files that scream STOCK (if you do, you must customize them)
I remember the first time I busted a site using a monster template. I smiled to myself, feeling special for having recognized it without ever having actually seen that exact template, just recognizing the style. I don’t smile anymore when I see monster templates being passed off as custom work, I just throw up in my mouth a little. I’m not saying everything they do is bad; in fact they come up with some pretty creative stuff. What I am saying is that if I hear that same cheesy song that always fades out after 5 seconds followed by the same transitions where EVERY interaction makes a noise, I am going to stab my computer and leave it bleeding in the dumpster behind KFC. This can be a hard thing to avoid if you are not used to seeing stock. If this is the case, my suggestion would be to spend a couple of hours searching templatemonster.com (they are the stockiest of the bunch) to get a feel for what I am talking about. Keep your eyes peeled for buttons that make noises, cheesy audio, generic photos, and recurring transitions. So many of them are the exact same thing with a slightly different layout, and mix and match navigation. Due to their generic nature, they tend to showcase the template rather than the content. It won’t take long for you to be a master at at spotting stock. Keep in mind, however, that you can use the stocky stock as a base and make it your own through customization. Stay tuned for a new post on this subject.

2. Make sure the template fits the project
I went to the website of a mixed martial arts gym the other day. I live for building sites with such visually intriguing subject matter. All you need to do is take a few big, beautiful images and build your site around them. Instead, the designer decided to take a classy-looking template well-suited for your neighborhood lawyer and throw in a couple 160 x 120px pictures of punching bags. If your content is interesting, let it speak for itself. There are many stock templates designed to do exactly that. If your content is boring, let the template be interesting. Don’t use a grunge, urban, or cartoon-y looking template unless it fits the style.

3. Make sure all your stock matches
Seeing multiple elements of a design that aren’t consistent with each other is a sure-fire way to spot stock. It’s more than likely that you are using more than one piece of stock for your design. Maybe your website’s header needs a stock flash slide show and the sidebar needs a stock “subscribe to newsletter” utility. They need to look custom and, more importantly, like they were built at the same time and by the same person. This can be difficult as they will more than likely be completely different. Your best bet is to change the visuals yourself or hire a designer to do it for you. This will be more expensive than straight stock, but far less expensive than having a designer do it from scratch (ex: stock – $25, stock + designer – $225, custom design – $2,000). Maybe you are mixing a stock photo of a mountain biker for the foreground and the Colorado Rockies for the background for your outdoor store. When photoshopping images together make sure the lighting, the angles, and the scale all match. Blurring background objects to create depth of field can hide many minor conflicts, but don’t rely on it. If you make everything fit together smoothly, no one will ever know that it wasn’t originally built that way.

Using pre-made images, flash, vector, video, and audio is a great way to save money and time. Just make sure you do it right. For more on using stock go to www.stockinaction.com.