February 20, 2009, Vol. 3, Issue 3

Napoleon Bonaparte was credited as saying, “Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours,” or “A good sketch is better than a long speech.”

And sometimes, there is no substitute for the perfect visual in a presentation or mock-up. Where can you find it? And if you’ve found one, how can you be sure to get the proper permissions or even to find out if you need to. Do your homework!

We’re happy to say that there are some amazing tools out there for visual research.

What is it?

Say you have a visual and you don’t know what it is? Try TinEye. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

This is seriously cool. Check out their examples page.

Think outside the Google

Of course you know how to search Google Images. And sure, it’s great. But think bigger! We suggest Zuula’s image search. With advanced features, it allows you to search Yahoo, Live, Exalead, Pixsy, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa and Stockxchng from one page. Oh, yeah, and Google, too.

Looking for moving pictures?

Why not try something new – The Online Video Guide. This database aggregates video content from YouTube, Hulu, Blinkx, and more than 3000 other sites. And when you finish finding what you need for work, you can quickly search for and find all of your favorite TV shows and movies to watch online. All videos play instantly within your web browser, and no registration is required to watch them. It’s really easy to use, and has almost every movie or TV show that you could think of. (Thanks to ResourceShelf for the pointer!)

Thanks for reading

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Now I’m going to visualize a warm summer day.

See you in two weeks!