Finding Diverse Visuals for Your Marketing Content: Tips & Resources

Do your customers see themselves in your content?

Thanks to growing awareness of entrenched, ongoing inequities in the United States and across the globe, all kinds of organizations are being called on to do better when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These efforts should be more than just for show, but at the same time, it is important that they’re visible.

That can be tricky when it comes to images for marketing collateral. Consumers expect brands to mirror the reality of their lives, while businesses also want to showcase diversity in visuals, but it has to be authentic. Without careful thought, it’s all too easy to hit the wrong notes, alienate potential customers, and draw negative attention to your brand. 

At the same time, visuals are a powerful medium for both reflecting and fostering change. At a time when the U.S. population is quickly becoming more diverse and we are more connected globally than ever, accurately representing a range of identities in photos and graphics is important to both mirror what our world looks like now and to foster a society where everyone feels welcomed, seen, and heard.

Beyond that, diversity in images is good for business. On LinkedIn Pages, using images can result in twice as many comments. Meanwhile, research shows that people are more likely to consider a product or service or take action after viewing an ad they consider diverse or inclusive. 

Tips for Finding Diverse Images to Feature in Your Content

A few guidelines can help you find images that showcase diversity in a respectful and meaningful manner:

• Acknowledge that diversity, inclusion and belonging goes beyond race and gender. Be sure to include age, size, disabilities, sexual orientation, religion, and culture. 
• Interrogate assumptions. Do you automatically gravitate toward men to indicate leadership or show women in “nurturing” roles? It’s worth noticing patterns and first instincts when choosing images.
• Avoid tokenization and stereotypes. Including one person who is meant to symbolize diversity in an image can suggest that the inclusion was to prevent criticism. Similarly, including diverse individuals but showing them engaged in behaviors or situations that are stereotypical of their background or group can amplify harmful clichés.

Overall, thinking about individuals as humans, rather than simply as representatives of a group, can be a good overall mindset. The more diverse your workforce is, the easier it will be to choose images that truly reflect the range of differences in our world.

Finding Diverse Imagery: Where to Look

When it comes to finding images that incorporate diversity, there is an overwhelming number of options. These are a few resources to consider depending on your budget, need for quality, and image type, whether photos or illustrations.

Dedicated Sources for Diverse Imagery

Recognizing the growing demand for images that feature diverse subjects, cultures, and settings, new image repositories are emerging with this specific purpose. Here are a couple of our favorites:

Nappy: The site’s stated mission is “to provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else.” All of these photos are free for personal or commercial use.

TONL: Founded by a Nigerian-American social entrepreneur and a Ghanaian-American photographer, TONL is another extensive image library focusing on DEI. The site’s navigation is helpfully organized around different dimensions of diversity, such as tone, tradition, and travel. Unlike Nappy, TONL doesn’t offer free images, but they have some reasonable pricing plans.

Subscription Sources for High-Quality Images

Shutterstock: With more than 175,000 images added every day, there are plenty of options here, including some royalty-free images. The site also offers curated collections, suggested search terms, and filters to make images that incorporate diversity easier to find.

Getty Images: One of the oldest, largest, and best-known sources for photos, Getty offers more than 400 million pieces of content. Users can see recently viewed and searched images and sort results by image resolution and best match. You can even search for work by specific photographers.

Free Stock Images

Unsplash: Search through more than two million images, including backgrounds and wallpapers. The site is easy to navigate, with intuitive tags that can help guide and refine a search for diverse subjects.

Flickr: A holdover from the early days of the internet, Flickr’s community of amateur and professional photographers offers billions of images. Users can sort via license type and color palette to quickly zero in on what they need. 

Pexels: In addition to being free, all photos on this site can be modified. Simple and streamlined, it’s easy and fast to sift through images to find representations of different identities. A leaderboard highlights the users with the most views over the last 30 days. 

Pixabay: Find what you need among more than 2.1 million photos as well as 330,000 illustrations. The site also offers details like what type of camera was used and how many times an image has been downloaded. 

Burst: Powered by the Shopify platform, Burst offers collections to make searching through the image library more efficient. Users can also send content suggestions to help expand its collection. 

Graphic Design

Canva: Not a designer? Not a problem! Canva offers templates, examples, and resources including a photo editor, color wheel, and palette generator to make creating graphic images easy. It comes in free, pro, and enterprise versions. 

Desygner: This platform also makes graphic design accessible with lots of tutorials and free templates. It even offers a selection of royalty-free images. 

Make Diversity in Marketing Images a Priority

Whether you are sourcing images or designing your own, keeping diversity top-of-mind is key. Having access to a large pool of images and resources can boost your organization’s efforts to convey a more inclusive marketing aesthetic.