Every day your senses are overloaded with images — your social media feed, videos you watch, websites you visit or even the billboards that dot the skyline. With so many visuals competing for attention, how can you ensure that your product/ service stands out?

The answer is simple. Stunning pictures.

Think about it, we’ve seen most brands come alive just by using the right images.

Be it your website, brochure, catalogue or product packaging, you’re going to want to make sure that you are using compelling and consistent pictures, across all touch points. This is key to capturing attention and conveying your brand story.

Here’s how you can go about finding and using images for branding?

Step 1: Create a mood board
Most people directly start looking for a ‘nice looking image’ to plug into their brochure, website, catalogue, etc. Over time, this won’t work as all their marketing material will start to look haphazard and inconsistent, which will leave customers feeling confused about what the brand and business really stands for.

What is a mood board?
Mood boards are collages, which are physical or digital. They contain several images, text, etc. to convey your business and brand identity.

It’s like a visual board of everything and anything that relates to the end goal. You can create a mood board for different things — a marketing campaign, website, brochure, logo creation, etc.

Creating mood board for your business is a valuable tool for:

Inspiration: Mood board’s help you focus on what is important – the vision, mission, identity and emotions you want to convey. It is good to have a visual reminder of why you started, what you started.

Affirmation: Mood boards help assert visually your brand emotion, values and culture into tangible things like design and words.

Guidance: This becomes the guiding light, when you create marketing and communication collaterals.

What should you include in your mood board?
Images: Collect images that are relatable, believable and interesting.

Colours: Set a colour palate. Are you going subtle or bold? Warm colours or cold?

Text: Collect fonts, sizes, styles that convey the mood. Something fancy can be said with Lucida Calligraphy, but something more formal can use Calibri.  

Patterns and shapes: Came across interesting shapes or patterns? Clip it and put it on the board. You never know where the inspiration comes from.

Words: Single words or inspirational quotes will eventually focus on words and emotions that you want to reiterate in your communication.

Step 2: Find the right image
While you could go ahead and recreate the wheel by hiring a photographer to get the custom image you want, that route is usually more costly and time consuming. The other way around is images available online. While there are many websites out there that provide access to millions of pictures, take your time in finding the right image, which will resonate with your audience. These images finally work towards building the value of your brand and company.

Amongst the many solutions available online, Shutterstock continues to be the platform that millions of people around the world rely on to do their best work. The right picture will help deepen customer engagement and create value, so make sure you take time and invest in the right solution.

                                         An ideal image for a brand that is fun, youthful, energetic, experiential 

Step 3: Choose the right imagery
Using your mood board, start looking for images that fit your brand. When choosing a image make sure you answer the following questions:

• Does your image resonate with your target audience?
• Are the images consistent with your image board?
• Are the images royalty free or have you given credit where it's due?
• Does the image stand out? Is it an image everyone is using?
• Does the image convey the emotions and story you want it to convey?                
• Is it the right size?
• Is the image high resolution or will it pixelate?
  
  

                                                An ideal image for a brand that is about family dynamics, future, protection, integrity

Visuals are an important facet of your branding strategy, so make sure you pick the ones that pack in the most punch.

Images source: shutterstock

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