Designers often have the need for stock photography when putting together a brochure, website, postcard, banner or other project. Typically, stock photography can take the place of hiring a photographer at a fraction of the cost. Stock images are also great for getting photos of those places you can’t be or vector drawings you can tweak to quickly produce professional art.

Don’t go the copyright infringing route of sneaking images off Google! It is much safer to use a stock photo house. Today we introduce and recommend to you Fotolia!

Fotolia is one of the top stock photo houses in the world and offers royalty free images, HD video, high resolution images and lots more. We’ve used their images, most recently on the team running and coaching site www.digitalrunning.com. Even if you use those other guys right now, you should know that Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and most affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print.

On Fotolia you can find photos based on a concept, emotion or theme. You can find people doing interesting things or simple single objects that are ready to use. Efficient search functionality is one of the foundations of Fotolia, so you can find what you are actually looking for quickly. Plus – model releases are guaranteed!

Supports The Arts! By paying for images, you’re helping photographers and illustrators earn a living. Photographers and designers receive commission from each image sold plus revenue from advertising on the free section of the site.

Credits to purchase an image start at just $.75 (that’s CENTS!) They offer a Plug-In that instantly adds high-resolution photos, videos & illustrations to PowerPoint or Word documents; and a Desktop Widget with drag and drop interface to search for stock images right from your desktop!

We were given a free month of Fotolia recently, and have had a blast finding just the right images for our projects. But we want to share the love <3 We can offer YOU a code to start a 2 week free subscription today… if you are a lucky winner!

How to Win

1. Like Fotolia on Facebook. You can mention we sent you on their wall.
2. Like RDesign on Facebook. You can say Happy Birthday to our owner, Raffi, on our wall!
3. Leave a comment here after you have completed both of those with your email address so we can contact you if you win. (Your email can be in the comment form, it does not have to be public in the comment itself.)

You can only enter once. You can tell all of your friends. We don’t care where you live or how old you are. We’ll choose 3 random winners on June 20th before Midnight EST.

To help spread the word, you can tweet this: “Win free stock photography from Fotolia and @RDesignOnline at http://bit.ly/mgdjWZ”

The distressed and grunge looks are hot these days. This quick tutorial will show you just how easy it is to create this effect on text in Illustrator.Let’s begin with some text. You can add small and simple design elements if you would like. Stay away from anything too complex.

We have our starting point, we need to gather our tools. Make sure that your Brushes Palette is open. (You can open the palette by going to Window > Brushes.) Now, go open a the Artistic-ChalkCharcoalPencil Brush Library by going to Window > Brush Libraries > Artistic-ChalkCharcoalPencil as shown below.Next, take your pen tool and draw a few lines through the text at various angles. Select a stroke color from you Color Palette, making sure that your stroke color is different than the text and any design elements you are using.Apply one of the brushes from the new Brush Library to all of your lines. I am using the top brush called “Chalk”.Now select the text and the brush strokes and expand it all by going to Object > Expand. Once the artwork has been expanded, we want to merge it all together. Open your Pathfinder Palette by going to Window > Pathfinder. With the expanded artwork selected, click on the Merge Icon in you Pathfinder Palette.Now, select the color of your brush strokes from the swatches in your Color Palette. Once the color appropriate color appears as your Fill Color, select all of the strokes by simply going to Select > Same > Fill Color. This will select all of the little shapes created by you brush strokes. With the shapes selected click the delete key on your keyboard or select the No Fill swatch from the Color Palette.Removing the color from those spots around the design creates the distressed/grunge look we are going for. 

Designers and recreational users alike will often find themselves looking to use special characters, like numerical fractions and trademark/copyright symbols.  The Glyphs Palette can save you the hassle of tweak, tweak, tweaking your standard text until a fraction looks right or creating a symbol by manually combining shapes and characters.

To open the Glyphs Palette, goto Text > Glyphs on your Illustrator menu.  The palette will open and display the glyphs available in the selected font.  Simply change the font on your Character Toolbar or Palette to change the glyphs being displayed.  To insert a glyph, place your text cursor somewhere on the artboard or with a line of text and then double click the appropriate glyph within the palette.