Photo Credit Horia Varlan

I woke up this morning to an infographic titled “10 Ways to Make Your Infographic Totally Awesome – ‘Our sarcastic tribute to those infographic designers who insist on doing it wrong…repeatedly and unashamedly.'” from Neo Mammalian Studios. It’s hilarious and right on the mark, go visit it right now, just come back afterwards. I found it via halfblog.net (Thank you Geoff).

I don’t care much for infographics on the whole and bad infographics? I’d use them as a virtual coaster for a virtual drink I just spilled and didn’t have a virtual paper towel to wipe off the drink on a virtual table I couldn’t possibly care less about whether or not it got virtual watermarks on it because it’s so easy to replace and besides it’s virtual.

That being said, while  I reading/laughing at this infographic, I flashed on #5 “Copyright is for losers“, with a little callout that says “Google images is your friend”.  I don’t know if it’s because I’ve researched copyright (meaning by no means am I an expert, but I’m knowledgeable), or because I just used this tool yesterday, but there’s an incredibly simple tool out there that helps avoid this.

You can find it at search.creativecommons.org. You put in your search terms and you can find images, video, music and other media that’s all licensed under Creative Commons and you can use for your posts, pages, etc. very liberally, in most cases for free with proper attribution and sharing as long as it’s not being used for commercial purposes. It searches sites such as Flickr, Google images, YouTube and many more that I wouldn’t know to search if it weren’t for this tool.

So take it or a spin, find a graphic or video or piece of music or two, that’s why it’s there. and if you have any other quick suggestions relating to the other 9 points on the infographic, feel free to share them in the comments section, I can always learn a thing or two about something new.