Our answer to How do creatives choose beautiful imagery for websites?
Answer by Jeevan Anandaskaran:
I’m not sure the process others use, in my case I connect the dots backwards based on the feeling I wish to induce in the viewer and only then move on to finding the image with the best color and composition to achieve this.
For a client this will be determined by what the ideal customer the client has identified for me. For a private school this may be parents with children ages 5–12 or for a home builder it may be first time home buyers.
For the first example of parents with young kids I want them to have a feeling of being happy and uplifted. For the second I want the potential customer to feel safe, confident and excited. With the addition of trust, these feelings will be 90% of client work out there.
There are two types of “Hero” images I look for specifically. They are either visually Expansive or Striking. Expansive is usually the large wide shots that a headline and message will sit in front of nicely. Most of the time the image will have to be muted in some way to maintain readability of your text.
To find a striking image which are harder to find, I’ll look for an unusual image with a main focus. This focus preferably is a human being with their eyes pointed as much to the camera as possible or at least pointed to a place I can use for marketing. It may go without saying that the image should be relevant to the messaging on the site.
Since these are harder to find I will mention the fact that I’m always on the lookout for striking images, especially free ones that I can bookmark or save to use in future projects. If you already know your ideal customers then this is not as big of a task as you may think.
It’s important to note that a single human face is the most powerful image you can use in marketing. Heat map testing proves this out that we are interested in a face on the screen and what the individual is looking at.
Both my examples are from Unsplash and is a good place to find great images for some select industries.
The way I see it is that my job as an artist is to evoke a response and my job as a marketer is to move that response somewhere.