Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

We’re All Guilty

If you are an artist, designer, HTML jockey, developer or anyone creating visual media of one sort or another, I am sure you are guilty of using a font, icon, background image, royalty fee (or maybe even not) stock photo to bring YOUR project to life and never giving credit!

Maybe, even… You didn’t even use anyone’s art or creations but were inspired by some one’s work or maybe that inspiration came from Mother Nature or God.

In the end, when you present your final work, you are expecting the people you built if for; users, clients, managers or bosses, to appreciate what you created, without crediting the people that, “unknowingly”, help you create it.

Sure, you’re not a bad person, you don’t mind crediting them, but there is always so little time, and you never get around to giving the credit or adding that snippet from the website asking you to give a citation.

I mean, come on, this would be like, if the people you created it for, which may happen, taking full credit for what you built. We all need feedback on what we create, so we can continue creating better and better work, so why not credit everyone and everything that inspired you! Besides, it’s good Karma.

Karma is Real!

I’m not a Buddhist, I’m actually a Christian, but Buddhist’s, Christian’s and Scientist can all back this up one way or another. When you spread the love, the love will come back. In this spirit, credit everyone and make sure to link to them, their website, their social links and any information they have already make public.

The search engines and their analytics will start to be a part of your online Karma, the linking and acknowledgements will start indexing and promote both of your sites, if your site is doing great and you’ve linked to them, they will see the traffic coming from your site and, “maybe”, return the love.

It doesn’t hurt to push your Karma a bit too, when you credit someone, make sure to reach out to them and let them know that you appreciate their work and featured it on a page in your work and don’t forget to share that example with them. Wouldn’t it be great to know every time someone appreciated and used your work?

The Time is Worth the Reward

Grabbing an image from, let’s say Unsplash, and throwing it up on your webpage is quick and easy, but crediting requires finding out who the artist is, recording their information, creating links and adding the acknowledgement, this seems like double the amount of work. However, if you follow the Karma rules above, then the benefits can be 10-fold. By crediting and reaching out to your contributor’s you might create useful backlinks, find that new best friend or the perfect businessperson to help you network where you never knew you had a connection.

Organization Creates Consistency

I’ll come clean, while creating the VybeOn website, I realized that I’ve been SO guilty of not giving credit where credit is deserved, so I decided while developing this website that no person would be left behind! But it is a bit time consuming because I would:

• download an image
• rename it to the media author and a description of the media
• create a text file with the media authors name and info
• download a headshot of the media creator
• create a contributor card in WordPress
• associate that contributor with where I used it

At first, I thought this was just crazy work, but then, while building out the VybeOn contributor library, I realized I was also building a repeatable style. Since I had already logged the people whom I used their media before, instead of doing random searches again for my next needed piece of media, I went to the artist I already used.

Building a short-listed artist library will help keep your site consistent in its media use since the artist you choose are constant with your style and their style will, “most likely”, be consistent and that in turn will give your work a unified style and flow.

Shoutouts

This whole article was created solely as my shout out to the “Unknowing” contributors to my website and giving them credit where credit is due. As such, please check out my contributors’ page HERE, and here is my personal repository of the creators I’m using and my reviews of them!

Artist Repository

Word Press Theme

• Rams Themes – https://ramsthemes.com/

Photography

• Clay Banks | @claybanks Unsplash Photo Community
• Clément Hélardot | @clemhlrdt Unsplash Photo Community
• Keenan Beasley | @keenanbeasley Unsplash Photo Community
• Nubelson Fernandes | @nublson Unsplash Photo Community