Choosing imagery for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about choosing imagery assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to keep

Generic stock photography actively lowers trust. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How we handle it

Every image should earn the bytes it costs. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

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
• 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 you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.