Re: your point about stock photos; even sans-budget there are still just other ways to find photos, images, etc. for free for a project — look to public domain; open source; free/libre; etc. communities. Places like https://www.flickr.com/commons gather all sorts of public domain or no known copyright restriction images. These not only are free to use, but often aren’t new or popular — there isn’t as much likelihood of it showing up somewhere else today; and there is a lot of room to put one’s own metaphors/meanings into these images and graphics. One can look for creative commons licensed things too. And then beyond just new places to find images, there’s the open font library, https://fontlibrary.org/ which gathers free/libre open source fonts. And there are even other free tools which provide new kinds of image making potential. Generative tools like Processing (https://processing.org/) or NodeBox (https://www.nodebox.net/download/) allow one to make some interesting designs based on specific content or contexts of a project.