Hello! Please introduce yourself.
I'm Annie Spratt, contributor and community manager
at Unsplash since January 2016. Part of the Unsplash team
works remotely, and I am one of them—based in the United
Kingdom (though I do visit and work with the rest of the
team in Montréal, Canada a few times each year which is
always nice!). My daily responsibilities include curating the
photos submitted to Unsplash, handling support enquiries,
talking with contributors and users, and working on special
projects within the community.
Simone Hutsch @heysupersimi
Top: Bryan Goff @bryangoffphoto
Opposite page: Andre Benz @trapnation
How did Unsplash come about? Was there a particular need
in the stock photography industry that led to its conception?
Unlike most big photography sites, Unsplash didn’t begin
as a startup with heady ambitions — it started as a Tumblr
account with a simple premise: ten new curated photos every
ten days, but with one super-special secret ingredient: every
photo was 100% free to use.
Whilst starting out with our one-time parent company,
Crew, which has since been acquired by Dribble, we found
that finding good stock photos was a problem. Stock photos
are generally cheesy and slightly cringeworthy—certainly not
the brand message that we wanted to portray to the world. We
hired a local photographer to shoot a set of photos for us, and the
photos that were left over we gave away on that Tumblr blog.
As it turns out, giving people the freedom to use beautiful
photos for whatever they wanted was a great way to make those
photos spread like wildfire. Unsplash is a humble side project that
happened at the right time, fixing an issue that it turns out many
people were having: sourcing decent free imagery.
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