Getting started with choosing imagery
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. A short on-ramp to choosing imagery for teams who have not touched it before.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What it costs to ignore
Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Real photos of real work beat polished irrelevance
- Change one thing and measure it
Every image should earn the bytes it costs. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
In practice
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
- Every image should earn the bytes it costs — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.