Does it ever happen to you when you looking on a site to have the impression that you saw a particular image somewhere else? I bet it does and I bet that I know what are those images. They are called stock images and you can find them almost everywhere. While they are a blessing in terms of price and availability, some of them are starting to be so overused that they are becoming annoying. I’m talking about images such as the one with the smiling call centre girl that you can see it almost everywhere, or the image with the smiling group of people in front of a computer. They try to replicate a real life scene but they are so overly dramatised that they are being transformed into an artificial and fake frame.

These generic images are so boring that they not only irritate the eyes of everyone with a decent knowledge of design or common taste in design but they can also inspire a lack of interest from the web designer or the website owner. If you use the call centre girl then I’m sorry but I prefer not being your client.

In this article you can see a collection of 15 of the most used cliche images in web design. What do you think? Do you know any other images like these?

 The handshake

The “Contact us” image

The “team” or the “company”

The “always good news” image

The ecology

Human shapes in front of a big map

People in front of a computer

Smiling doctor

The puzzle

Person creating a graph

The skyscrapers

Politically correct images (minorities)

Signing documents

The system engineer with the server

The “www” image