Does your picture tell your story?

Images are important! They have in them the power to make the user laugh, cry, become sad, angry, happy, elated, motivated and ignorant and much more. When we decide on designing a human interface we always think of the emotions we want from the human. We also think of the message we want to convey to the human. Basically emotions are the key in design to make a user go from Ugh to AWW!

I feel sad, to say that I have also used placeholder images in designs and front-end, in past. I now understand why we should never put placeholders, and images should be well thought of.

At best placeholders are for wire-frames.

The best way to understand this is by taking an example and experiencing the difference it makes in actually putting in the effort to choose the right images. Let us do just that.

Recently I was asked to design and develop the landing page of Consciously.life which is this amazing product that replaces 3rd party ads with inspiring images and to-dos. As Joel(founder) says, it is Adblocker meets Pinterest.

The theme for Consciously.life is inspirational, elegant and minimal. Check out the below image for a version of home page design:

The images are great individually but are they conveying a theme? Are they part of something bigger? Do they not look like thrown together in a random manner?

Now check out the below image:

It is definitely less colours than before, but does the collage draw a picture? Do they look like they belong together and look better with each other. And is the whole effect elegant, minimal and inspiring?

And the most important of all, do they complement the whole webpage and also add a slight contrast while also making sure to not draw too much attention from the main content, that we want the user to focus on? There is a reason there are shades of blue and most of the space is white. Notice how blue gives a slight contrast to pink, hence not making the pink colour overbearing.

So what are the points, one must think about when deciding on the images?

• Are the images supposed to give attention or are they supposed to be subtle?
• Are they performing as they are supposed to based on above points?
• Are they conforming to the overall theme of the design?
• Are they supposed have some specific colours to make them more aligned with the theme?
• Are they conveying the message of the brand or whatever message we need to convey?
• Are they licensed :D ?
• If there are more than one image, do they fit together like they were captured for each other?
• Right colours are important to bind everything together.
• Does the end result look beautiful?

Correctly chosen images can make the design look amazing while an amazing design can look bad or average with the wrong images.

There are images for your design and there are images not for your design. Choose the right ones!

A huge thanks to the generous community at Unsplash for the amazing pictures they work hard to capture. Don’t forget to check out Consciously.life, you would love it.

And not to forget follow me for more posts on design, tech and spirituality.

What are your thoughts on this post? Quick, write a response :)