Fresh

A never-ending battle has been raging since days of old about the virtues of custom, project-specific photography vs. stock photography. Each has its benefits and drawbacks and depending on your role in a project you could be on one side of the fence or the other. I am a designer with an extensive photography background. I have a bias, so if you’re looking for a true comparison as to which is better, stock vs. custom, look somewhere else. I have very clear views on the role of photography in design and how it can help achieve the goals of a given project. Achieving the goals of the client are always the top priority and finding the best way to do that is the responsibility of the designer.

While stock photography offers a low-cost option to designers looking for images for just about any type of project, often times the quality is less than spectacular. In fact, sometimes the quality is just plain terrible. If you are a designer there is no doubt in my mind that you at one time or another have spent hours on end scrolling through an endless stream of stock photography looking for that perfect image. It isn’t in there. That perfect image is never in that stream of endless photography. That’s because the perfect image is different depending on the specific project and the goals of said project. That perfect image has to be carefully crafted and refined to convey the message it was intended to. I understand that there is a time and place for stock photography. Sometimes you just need a shot of a monkey in a diaper, I get that. But how often have you found yourself wondering if the header of that website would be even more impactful if it was your monkey in the diaper?

I had the opportunity to work on a photoshoot recently where the photographer was able to take the creative team’s ideas and compose the perfect image for us to base our entire campaign on. I mean perfect. We based almost all of our creative choices on this one image. It was exactly what we wanted it to be and in turn we found ourselves working for one happy client. The best part of this whole story is that we began the entire campaign with a photo collage of stock photography. The collage didn’t hit the mark and the client decided that we should go ahead with the custom shoot. In the end the campaign that we were able to craft was based entirely on the assets that were created by that wonderful photographer. Did I mention that we won awards for that campaign?

For a designer, being given the opportunity to craft images based on the content that they will be paired with is the thing dreams are made of. Quite frankly, these are also the kind of projects that end up being the most successful because time and care was taken in the creation of that content. It doesn’t matter where a final project is going to end up; if time and care is taken with the content of the message and imagery that is paired with it, that project will have a much better chance of being successful.

The moral of this story is that just because stock photography is an easy option doesn’t mean it is the right decision for your project. We as designers are responsible for teaching our clients about the ways of persuasion. We are tasked with creatively solving their communication challenges. Ever heard the statement a picture is worth a thousand words? It’s still true. As a designer I take every opportunity to educate anyone that will listen about the virtues of visual communication. Show me, don’t tell me.