A brand's images are usually the least governed part of its identity. Logos and colours get precise specifications; photography gets a mood board and hope. The result is a website where every image looks like it came from a different company.
What to Actually Specify
Subject and content
- What do we photograph? People, products, places, abstract?
- Are people posed or candid? Looking at camera or not? Alone or in groups?
- What do we never show? (Often the most useful line in the document.)
Light and colour
- Bright and airy, or dark and moody?
- Warm or cool white balance?
- Natural light or studio?
- A stated colour palette that images should harmonize with, including which brand colours may appear as props or backdrops.
Composition
- Typical crops and ratios.
- Amount of negative space — critical if text is overlaid on images.
- Camera height and distance conventions.
- Depth of field: shallow and cinematic, or sharp and documentary?
Treatment
- Level of retouching, stated explicitly.
- Contrast and saturation direction: muted, natural, punchy.
- Whether black and white is used, and when.
- Any consistent grade or filter — with a shareable preset, not a description.
Technical
- Delivery sizes, formats and compression budgets.
- File naming and metadata requirements.
- Accessibility requirements: alt text expectations, contrast for text over images.
The Do-Not List Does the Heavy Lifting
Positive descriptions are interpreted loosely; prohibitions are followed. Be blunt:
- No heavy filters or vignettes.
- No stock photography of people pointing at whiteboards.
- No text baked into photographs.
- No mixed colour temperatures within a set.
- No images below the stated minimum resolution.
- No logos of other brands visible.
Five specific prohibitions are worth twenty adjectives.
Show Examples, Including Bad Ones
The most useful page in any image style guide is a side-by-side of on-brand and off-brand, with one sentence explaining why each fails. People calibrate from examples far faster than from prose. Include real images you've published, not aspirational ones from elsewhere.
Make It Usable
- One page of rules, plus an example gallery. A forty-page document is not consulted.
- Include the presets and templates — an editing preset, an export template, a crop template. Tools enforce guidelines better than documents.
- Say who decides when something is borderline, and how to ask.
- Cover sourcing: approved libraries, licence requirements, and where images live once approved.
- Version it and note the date; brands drift and the guide must keep up.
Maintaining Consistency Over Time
- Audit periodically. Put your last twenty published images side by side; inconsistency is instantly visible in a grid even when it isn't in a feed.
- Brief external photographers with the guide, not with vague direction — and share the do-not list first.
- Keep an approved image library so people reuse compliant images rather than sourcing new ones under time pressure, which is when standards slip.
- Update after each major shoot, adding new examples so the guide reflects what you actually publish rather than what you intended two years ago.