The Importance of Good Design
Long gone are those days when artists were strictly confined to their discipline, without influencing or being influenced. As a travel photographer and time-lapse specialist, I have many moments of introspection in my daily work, solitude and meditation, which I often use to think about what surrounds us, how everything is changing and how fast it happens.
Our world is absolutely visual, almost everything is made of images, and users, customers or followers are meticulous in their choices, they want quality because they already have quantity. That’s why every day, we, photographers, do our best to offer works that move and are excellent.
Talking with colleagues in the industry, I realized that we often neglect an important aspect: our brand image. We are not only our projects, most of our work is now online, where competition is no longer local but global.
In the case of photographers and videographers, we had to adapt to a whole new system, a digital era where social networks, image banks and online video dominate most of our agenda and efforts, to the point to say that we spend more time creating and promoting our brand image than creating our works.
If our brand image is so important, and how the public (now called followers) perceive it, why invest little time, effort and money in designing it? Why few photographers invest money in a professional designer in order to create a good corporate image? Why, when we need to build a website or create a logo, we rely on a friend with little knowledge of design? Or worse, we do it ourselves to save money? Is this not the same attitude that we, photographers, always complain about when talking about photography?
We just surf the net and visit few websites of photographers and videographers and look at their designs. Sadly we can see that most of them have a mediocre layout, obsolete structures, impossible colors, wrong fonts, etc. In short, a compendium of broken rules, some so basic you do not understand how visual artists have been able to commit such an atrocity.
And few more questions: shouldn’t we be role models and take care of our brand image as well as we care of our pictures or videos? Shouldn’t we treat designers as we ask our customers to treat us and our pictures? I certainly think so.
The same way we complain when a designer takes pictures him-/herself for a catalog, magazine or website, we should analyze what happens when a photographer acts as a designer or asks his/her programmer cousin to do it.
That being said, there are designers who make great pictures and photographers who know basic design and composition structures etc … However, this is not always the case, and we should know where our limits are. Knowing yourself is the key to success, and delegating to the best professionals too.
Designing is not a child’s game, it is a very powerful tool, able to improve your brand image, the perception people have of your personal and professional background. However, be careful, because design can be harmful to your image and work if it’s bad or inappropriate, making you look less professional than you really are. A client that comes to your website might think that you’re not the right candidate for his/her project.
Most of my clients are foreigners, they come to me through my website or social media. They are complete strangers, and in most cases I will never meet them, therefore, the image that I project is very important, so I decided to go a step further, hiring a professional design studio. Gloria, the designer, has taken care of every element of my brand image with maximum care, so every part of it reflects the excitement and enthusiasm that we both put in our profession. Is not that what we all are seeking? Capturing our emotions in images?
I put much effort into all my work to reach the highest excellence, I am meticulous and careful because I want to always have the best results. I felt that my brand image wasn’t at that level, so I decided to change it. Now I am comfortable with all it transmits, there is consistency. A sober, simple, clear, decisive and strong image. No frills, straightforward. Efficient.
Hope you like it as much as I do.
You can see all my brand image and more projects at Glorium Organicus.