Choosing imagery, explained without the jargon

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Here is choosing imagery without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Where to go from here

Every image should earn the bytes it costs. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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.