By James White
Great images and illustrations are crucial to generating viewer interest and engagement with your site. However, unless youÂre a professional photographer or designer, finding fresh, interesting graphics to add to your text can be difficult. Luckily, there are sites online that offer great visual content that can be easily added to your site.
Unsplash
Unsplash features free, copyright-free, high-resolution photos. They post 10 new photos every 10 days, so you won’t run out of great images for your content. You can subscribe to the site to get alerts when they post new images, too.
Picjumbo
Like Unsplash, Picjumbo offers free photos to use with your content. There is a new photo posted every day, and you can subscribe to their newsletter to stay on top of new offerings.
NVD3.js
This content site, NVD3.js, may have a strange name, but it has great content. Need a chart for your article or blog? NVD3.js gives you a plethora of pre-made graphs you can customize with your data. YouÂll need to know a little about coding to use this site, though.
Lettering.JS
Lettering.JS is a jQuery plug-in that allows you to create your own graphic text, kerning type, logos and more. If you ever wanted to jazz up your content’s text, this is the tool to use.
Scrollorama
Have you ever thought, “Gee, I wonder how blogs make their text zoom and spin when you scroll down the page?” Well, Scrollorama can make your content dreams come true in the form of a jQuery plug-in. This tool will help you make text flip, zoom, fade and practically jump through hoops.
Mapbox
Trying to explain what your town would look like with a few adjustments? Decided to map out your next road trip? Want to illustrate what the Union would look like if France never sold the United States all that land? If so, Mapbox can help. This tool helps you create the map of your dreams and post it with your content.
Flat Icons
Elegant Themes offers 384 flat icons you can download for free. All you have to do is press the download button, and all of the icons are at your fingertips in just seconds.
Ease.ly
Infographics are a huge crowd pleaser. Who doesn’t like ingesting bite-size information with a scoop of interesting illustrations? Ease.ly is one of the top free infographic tools online. You can use it to build your own custom infographics, like this example from CJ Pony Parts, for your site.
Meme Generator
Okay, infographics are hot right now, but nothing can beat the meme when it comes to graphics popularity. You can create your own meme to fit any occasion using the Meme Generator. It allows you to edit already popular memes to fit your needs, or you can make one from scratch. Don’t feel like making or editing a meme? Just use one that someone else created (with attribution, of course).
Openclipart
Clip art may be the old stand-by for graphics, but it’s never gone out of style. Openclipart offers thousands of images that you can download and use. There’s everything from cartoon bunnies to drawings of sticks and everything in-between.
Text got you down? Take any or all of these tools out for a test drive, and youÂll never have boring content again.