Brand Personality through images

Branding… that old thing. Not long ago we offered up tips on how to make your brand buzz not bore, and a key ingredient especially amongst the bigger players was the imagery, whether it be a Christmas campaign or an everyday tweet. So many times we see photography and video retreat to the last thing on peoples minds when thinking about a new site or a refresh, they’re either hooked by Tim Cook’s new twin lens, software filled iPhone 7 plus promising to provide the greatest images of their life, or at the last minute a rush around the stock libraries is in order, and we know how that turns out.

When you begin your journey with Giant Peach, we always recommend photography and video be as big of a player as the rest of your brand, that age old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is never so true. Images are the first point of contact, the largest impression your customer will first have of you, they could even be the clincher. Let’s begin with an example..

You’re looking to book a spontaneous trip so you have a flit around a few trip search sites, Airbnb then Trivago. It becomes apparent quite quickly who’s putting the extra leg work in here. Airbnb actually try to pair each of their listed properties with a professional photographer, which is no small task when you consider the area (read: the world) they cover. Pair that up with some simplistic, clean design, a video banner and you’ve got the perfect recipe for visitor retention. Trivago? I like to have options, but it’s beginning to look dated, overly complicated and lacking personality.. #SorryNotSorry.

These images can create a brand as much as tone of voice. When Change Recruitment came to us they wanted to refresh the image of the company. We took things back to basics, first refreshing the colour palette to something more swav. Next up, the design created a simple, easy to follow walkthrough from search to application. And the final piece of the puzzle; photography and video. We created a bespoke look for the Change imagery, using the refreshed brand colours to subtly tone the shadows and highlights of each image, along with a very gentle softening to make warm, inviting yet professional images. This all came complete as part of the styling guide, just for reference to help maintain the new style.

This is the same concept we applied when working with Longford Estates, who have four separate sites that we apply styles for. Take for example Longford Farms:We wanted the photos to have an edge to them, but maintain a rustic, natural look to coincide with industry and the new site. The use of contrast adds that rough detail to the images, and allows us to gently desaturate the image without losing any definition, which overall gives a natural, rustic look.

For Trafalgar Fisheries we used blues selected from the water to tone the overall image, combined with some clever use of blur to actually sharpen the image (go figure..). This finished off with slightly crushed blacks retains that feeling of the natural goodness you expect from the product.

Another way of looking at this is to compare styles, and a good place we can start to do this is headshots. We’ve taken hundreds of headshots over the past year, for many different companies, yet for each we create it’s own unique style. Four different photographs, four different industries.

We work with a client to make decisions before we even pick up a camera to create a look that reflects their brand personality; should the lighting be hard and edgy, or soft and friendly? Should the images be highly saturated, neutral or monotone? Should the images be shot in a studio or on location? The list can go on, what’s important is all these things come together to create images that help reinforce your brand.