Think about content holistically, choose images wisely
By: Juan Madrigal
There’s a not-so-well-kept secret in the design, marketing and advertising industry and it’s called free stock images. I’m not against the companies that offer free or cheap stock images, I believe it’s a great resource, and there’s nothing better than to be able to to use decent images for your project and not to spend a huge chunk of your budget: but this comes at price, that is almost impossible to calculate. A price your project will pay for the disconnection between copy and images. The pool of quality images is so small, that you’ll likely end up using an image that’s being used everywhere on the web. And this also happens with paid stock images.
We know the importance of content, but when the word “Content” pops up, we are basically just thinking about written copy in digital and print media pieces, so images are in most cases an afterthought unless we are talking about editorial pieces. From the beginning of the project, budgets are rarely assigned to images, whether photos or illustrations and once the project is well advanced, there isn’t any budget allocated for images, this happens either by mistake or by disregarding the importance of those images as a crucial part of the content.
An image is worth a thousand words.
A bad image is worth more than a thousand bad words.
I can say that most of the times I have designed for any kind of media, from print to digital, I had to place the infamous initials FPO or “For position/placement only”. Yes, there are cases where from the moment you started designing you knew what kind of images you were going to use, because those images were commissioned to a photographer or an illustrator but today you can just place beautiful free images, and some designers might even think they are saving money for the company when they are not. It is worth mentioning that when you don’t have a choice, free images are a blessing, but when the company you are working for, or a client believes images are not worth including in the budget, then there’s a problem, apart from a deep disregard for professionals like photographers, videographers, and illustrators, there’s no understanding about content. Cutting corners and saving a little bit of money on a project by not investing in proper images is like buying a sports car and getting cheap small tires, it’s just not going to perform well. But hey, It’s more than ok to use free images for a blog post or small projects that lack budget.
The message is simple. Unless your project is small and with a restrictive budget, or for a very small company or client, don’t be cheap.
Nowadays, we talk a lot about the importance of “UX writing” but good UX writing or good copy writing for a project will be affected if the other parts are not on the same level or lack cohesion to the content. Content is text, images, typography, the design of all the parts working with each other, and it also includes user experience. Good content with bad UX is a shame, and the same goes the opposite way.
Something is off
When you see the same generic images across sites, apps, banners, blogs, emails or any digital media, you know subconsciously that something is off: your brain reacts to the un-original image, to the confusing image you thought you saw somewhere else, to the digital piece that doesn’t grab your attention because it is the same image you have been seeing over and over and it has become information pollution.
The von Restorff effect, which is often referred to as the “isolation effect,” predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered¹.
This isolation effect plays along with the consolidated memory in your brain and the more the information is repeated or used, the more likely it is to be retained in the long-term memory: add memory to the isolation effect and your users couldn’t care less about your content. So whether you remember or not those images, you are rapidly scanning through visuals and avoiding those that your brain has “seen” many times.
There’s also a factor that Jakob Nielsen has been ranting about for many years, and it’s that users just scan through and completely ignore content when feel-good or decorative images are present. In the article “Photos as Web Content”, Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking studies have come to several conclusions about how we see, or don’t, images:
- Some types of pictures are completely ignored. This is typically the case for big feel-good images that are purely decorative.
- Other types of pictures are treated as important content and scrutinized. Photos of products and real people (as opposed to stock photos of models) often fall into this category.
- In ecommerce, product photos help users understand products and differentiate between similar items.
- On personal websites, users want to see the person behind the site; author photos, for example, are a key usability guideline for blogs.
Invest in good photo shoots: a great photographer can add a fortune to your website’s business value. — Jakob Nielsen
Don’t shoot the messenger
I’ll say it for the third time, the problem is not the source, it’s what kind of images you use and what you do with them. Unsplash is an industry disruptor and I believe they are benefiting the digital industry, but it doesn’t matter if the images are free or if you are paying a small fee for stock images, you still have to choose wisely. One example for this is “The world’s most famous stock photo model”: if you are a designer and you haven’t seen her and remembered that she’s everywhere, then you haven’t realized that you’re not paying attention to your surroundings. For those who can’t remember, I invite you to make an effort and recall those stored memories: there are even memes about her being everywhere (not about her as a person).
The problem with using photos with this model is that she’s very “famously unknown”, which is very different than when you see a famous model or celebrity everywhere on digital and print media pieces.
Although I’m a photographer and contributor for Getty Images, and I’m mostly talking only about photos, I’m also talking about illustrations, videos, infographics, or any image and how they should help the content copy not damage the content as a whole.
Too much of the same
Many pages I visited while doing reverse image search for this article, had in fact, most of their images from free stock images sites and/or paid stock sites. I even found published books that had free images on the covers. The following examples are from sites mostly offering services, none of these examples are for blogs. Yes, probably some of these examples are from companies with a small or no budget at all but after scrolling down and seeing the same images you start
Adding value
Images are a way to reinforce copy, not to distract or damage your content message. Images add value the content and one of the best examples I have seen lately is the App Store, Khoi Vinh writes a brilliant piece about how the combination of images in the App Store’s hybrid of product design and editorial design it’s a huge breakthrough. Some examples from Khoi’s article:
Pro tip
Name you images, but be nice. Don’t give snarky names like “afro-analyzing-brainstorming-1124062.jpg”.
Also, pay for the images you use, don’t steal. I had a boss telling me to use illustrations we didn’t have the rights for, I explained that we couldn’t use them because we didn’t have the rights and she said that if the illustrator finds out we’ll pay him later, obviously I got into heated discussion.
Don’t use images as an afterthought, choose them wisely and think about images with a holistic approach to content.
And last but not least, as designers we have to do better and make an effort to choose better images, it is part of the design process.
Don’t be a cheap bastard.
Anything to add?
Would you like to add or share anything? Let’s talk.
— And very special thanks to my editor, Merriah Lamb.
¹Parker, Amanda; Wilding, Edward; Akerman, Colin (1998). “The von Restorff Effect in Visual Object Recognition Memory in Humans and Monkeys: The Role of Frontal/Perirhinal Interaction”. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 10 (6): 691–703. doi:10.1162/089892998563103. PMID 9831738.
The original article appears in UX Collective and it was written by Juan Madrigal, you can find the original article here.
