The Global Design Trends 2011 infographic from Shutterstock shares some of the image usage data that only they have due to the nature of their business.

After 8 years, 17 million images and over 200 million downloads, Shutterstock has become one of the world’s leading marketplaces for visual media. We have artists and photographers from more than 100 countries, and customers in more than 150. But perhaps most significant about these milestones is that it has led to tens of thousands of image searches each day – giving us valuable insight into design trends around the world.

From vintage-themed photographs, to vibrant vector graphics, here’s an infographic detailing what visual stories were told over the last year.

I love that Shutterstock has some unique data internally that they are analyzing in aggregate and now sharing with the world.  It’s not complicated, but I love that they actually included some of the most downloaded images in the design.  They are showing the reader what was popular instead of just telling the reader about it.  My favorite section is the Evolving Visual Vocabulary showing how the meaning of the image keywords is changing over time.

They made a couple unusual publishing choices.  The image posted on the blog is 714px wide (an odd number) so the small text is blurry and pixelated.  I don’t think they have enough detailed data in this design for a zooming viewer, but if you click on the image from their blog post, it takes you to the full 3,300 pixel wide image loaded into Zoom.it.  They also link to the high-resolution JPG image file, and (a great idea!) a lightbox on Shutterstock that includes all of the images highlighted in the infographic.

A handful of statistics are just listed in text instead of visualized like they should be: 150 countries, 16 million downloads, 6 million downloads, 5 million downloads, etc.

A couple standard things missing that a lot of designers seem to consistently miss: a copyright statement, the URL for readers to find the original infographic landing page (the specific blog post on Shutterstock in this case), and a credit mention for the designer (Shutterstock is all about designers!).  I hope the team at Shutterstock paid the license fes for using these images in their infographic design!  No need for a Sources statement, since all of the data comes from their own site server data.

Thanks to Aaron for sending in the link!