By Matt Lackey
Stock photos are great, but they are often abused. Too many young websites go for the boxed wine specials, when there is some great “two-buck chuck” out there. Not every project or client will be fortunate enough to have a huge collection of custom photography to fit your every need, but bad stock photography can ruin your site and your client’s credibility. (Embarrassingly enough, having a client with an infinite amount of photos may have been a recurring dream of mine.) As alluring as they may seem, don’t be tempted to use those cheap stock business photographs with the same 5 people in 80 different poses. Take your time. Do some research and set a standard for the website and for yourself.
Setting the “standard”
To set our standard for photography (and for our designs in general), we start with a vision that’s based on a concept and evolved through research. We pull all of the research together and create a digital moodboard. This moodboard consists of example photography, colors, keywords and descriptive copy. In the future, this will assist the client (after the project is handed over) and future design teams in browsing through thousands of images and selecting photographs that align with the original vision. This not only helps create the style of the website, but helps preserve it over time.
Don’t let bad stock photography sink your design. Try your best not to settle. Set a standard and stick to it. Just like you should spend some time perusing BevMo during their 5-cent sale, take your time with your photography. It’ll pay off in the end.
Comments 2
Nice write-up. It kind of goes with out saying that there’s very little you can do to make a bad photo work or fit nicely into an environment, even a very well designed one. I have a project coming up with this issue, I’ll definitely be putting some hours in to either finding good stock imagery, or taking custom photos myself.
I especially like your mention of preserving the web design, set the bar high.
Cheers!
nice post!
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