A practical checklist for choosing imagery
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time choosing imagery comes up.
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.
The checklist
- Generic stock photography actively lowers trust
- Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance
- Every image should earn the bytes it costs
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
Why this earns attention
Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
What this looks like day to day
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about choosing imagery before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.