We’ll share some of our cool uses of images from subscription services in this article.
Welcome to another Sourcing Series segment presented by the Data Literacy Program (DLP) of the Alexandria Archive Institute. In this article, we introduce a couple of subscription-based sources for (re)usable images. This is a follow-up to our introduction to online sources for reusable images.
Besides free sources, another option for reusing digital images you haven’t made yourself is to get and/or maintain a subscription to a service that licenses images. These are what folks who regularly work with graphics call “stock” images. The Noun Project and Adobe Stock are two paid online sources that we’ve used here at the DLP. Both have tons of images and we use them in a lot of different places. For example, the book in our Digital Data Stories logo is an Adobe Stock image.
These services allow people to use the image while maintaining a subscription to or by purchasing different kinds of licenses. You might choose to buy a license when your subscription’s license doesn’t cover your intended use. For both Adobe Stock and the Noun Project, their licenses allow use, reuse, and modification so that we can include them in our Digital Data Stories and other materials. Such a license allowed us to alter the original image from our logo into the rainbow version we use for AAI Reads and keep using the image without obtaining another license.
As Adobe Stock is well known, we’ll explore the other subscription platform we like for images, the Noun Project. The Noun Project, similar to other stock image providers, allows use of their images as long as one maintains a subscription to their platform. This subscription allows one access to royalty-free images of different types depending on the type of subscription you have. If a subscription isn’t right for you, you can still get free black and white versions. For those, you’ll need to credit the artist in the way they’ve listed for whatever pieces you use. Learn more about the Noun Project’s attribution rules for free versions here.
The Noun Project
One cool thing about the Noun Project is that because many of their images are vector images (aka line drawings with discrete boundaries) subscribers can download them in whatever color they want and the icons scale easily. This meant that any Noun Project icons we used matched our branding colors exactly and that we could adapt them to match our design ideas.
As none of us here at the DLP are artists ourselves, we really appreciate the work artists do to create cool visuals and their gracious sharing of them. While illustrating our Digital Data Stories is sometimes just a matter of arranging the right icons together, other times we use our digital skills to tweak them into something unique.
This is “Pyramid” by luca orlandini from the Noun Project under a Royalty-Free License. We used it as the raw material for a very edited version that we needed for a Data Story.
One example of that is this Noun Project pyramid. We’ve used it a few times because it’s a great representation of a step pyramid. However, in the book entry image for Four Lost Cities we used some of our digital skills to modify that icon into a unique one based on an image from Wikimedia Commons.
We did this because what we needed for Four Lost Cities, was an icon that reminded us of Cahokia. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find one. What we did find was this photograph of a reconstruction of the site from Wikimedia Commons, another cool source for images. It gave us an idea of what Cahokia looked like. Unfortunately, we weren’t skilled enough to use it to create something from scratch that matched the other icons in the Four Lost Cities book entry image. So we decided, why not modify something with the right style?
This is “Cahokia Mounds — UNESCO reconstruction” by Thank You (24 Millions) views from Wikimedia Commons and previously Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 license. We used this image to guide our adaptation of “Pyramid” to look like Cahokia.
So, using the Wikimedia Commons image as a guide, we cut and pasted different parts of the Noun Project pyramid over and over and over again until it gave us the icon below. It gives the feel of the Cahokia image but in a style matching the other icons. You can see it in action, in Part Two and Three of the Digital Data Story Of Myceanean Men.
Here’s an example of how we’ve modified and combined various images to better represent the books recommended in our Data Stories. This is our final icon-style version of Cahokia that you can spot in our book entries for Four Lost Cities. We call this “noun-pyramid-26760-1F294D-PFPedits” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY 2.0.
Now that you know a bit more about what you can do with subscription images, take the chance to explore them (which you can do without a subscription) and see if they might be useful for your next project or presentation. But remember, any media (at least ones that aren’t public domain) should also come with proper attribution information as guided by the license associated with how you obtained rights to the image. We used the TASL system of Creative Commons for our final Cahokia icon. With that, we hope you explore the other articles in our Sourcing Series. Happy searching!
Image Credits: The main header image is an adaptation of an Adobe Stock image that we use as a logo for the Data Literacy Program (DLP) with the added title for the series and the specific title related to this article. All other images include their full attribution information in their captions.
Article Updates: On 24 July 2025, the author added links to other Sourcing Series articles on attribution and a Data Story Short on TASL attribution as well as a link to Creative Commons’ attribution recommendations.
