Everybody who has already published poetry or articles on the net knows that combining a text with an image makes it invaluably more attractive and inviting to the eye than just a naked skeleton of black on white characters.

Nevertheless, every serious writer has to devote a lot of time and efforts to practicing his or her craft and does not always necessarily have the time or the will to deal with visual matters, not even speaking about the copyrighting.

Today we will show you how Creative Commons has simplified the whole process.

What is Creative Commons?

CC is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.

How can I Benefit?

If you’re using Firefox as a web-browser (which is highly suggested for many reasons) you can use custom search-engines in the upper right corner of your browser. There is a great variety to choose from, e.g. you can add a wikipedia or youtube, making your whole searching experience a lot easier. To those who do not know it yet, we want to recommend to you the Creative Commons Search Engine Add-On. What does it do?

Very Simply: Give it a search term and it will find images, videos and other media which you can freely use with your own work. See screenshot below:

How can I install it?

just follow this link, and click where it says “Creative Commons” under point 3. Then hit “add” in the pop-up dialogue and start searching.

note: make sure to always look under which license your desired material is published. a complete listing and guide can be found here . Don’t worry! It may look a bit complicated at the beginning but actually is very straighforward and easy to understand.

sources: tutorial by Poetry A Source Of Life, CC-definition by Wiki, img by pedrosimoes7 via flickr