60+ photos (and PSD mockups) featuring hands of all shades, shapes, and sizes
Before launching Nappy, we were designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs looking for one thing… “normal” photos of Black people.
Of course we’ve seen the stock photos of the Black businessman with his arms crossed or the infamous “diversity” photos of team members sitting at a conference table that featured one Black or Brown person.
But we weren’t looking for those photos. We were looking for normal photos of Black fathers and their daughters. Photos of Black people drinking coffee. Photos of Black couples getting married. You get the picture.
That’s why we launched Nappy—a stock photo website with the sole purpose of breaking down stereotypes and improving representation for Black and Brown people.
So, we were excited when product agency, MetaLab, reached out to us to partner on our next “normal” photo collection—Black and Brown hands interacting with devices that we use every single day. Designers use this kind of photo to show how an app looks in context on a phone, tablet, or computer.
According to a 2015 Nielsen study, Black/Brown consumers owned tech at a larger rate than white consumers. But still, the majority of product mockup shots feature white, young, abled-body hands.
So, together with MetaLab, we’d like to introduce All Hands, a photo collection of hi-res product mockups that features Black and Brown hands. The collection is free and available for download now. In addition to the photos, we’ve also created PSDs that make it easy to add mockups, as a smart object layer, on the device screen.
In addition to focusing on diverse skin tones, we wanted this collection to also represent accessibility, gender fluidity, age, and body positivity. To execute this, we worked with 9 Black and Brown models of various ranges of age, body type, etc.
This collection is not the end-all, be-all solution for representation, but we hope it gives designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs the tools to connect with their audiences and better represent them in their designs.
If you want to mockup your designs on a device, check out the layered PSD files.