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”