Before you invest in choosing imagery

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Before you spend anything on choosing imagery, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Generic stock photography actively lowers trust
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Every image should earn the bytes it costs. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How to tell if yours is fine

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about choosing imagery before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Generic stock photography actively lowers trust — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.