A cohesive visual aesthetic plays a crucial role in creating a lasting impression on your target audience and differentiating your business from competitors. Photography, in particular, is a powerful tool for communicating your brand’s personality and values through captivating visuals. Developing a photography style guide helps define the visual elements of your brand, so you can succinctly communicate your personality and core message to your audience.
Understand Your Audience
Establishing a cohesive brand identity for your marketing strategy, through photography, should begin with a deep understanding of your brand’s core values and personality. Before diving into visual elements like photos and videos, you need to define the fundamental characteristics that make your brand unique and resonate with your target audience.
What are you hoping to achieve with your photos – who are you targeting and what are you hoping their reaction will be when seeing your images? Your brand photography guide needs to reflect your tone of voice, your identity as a business, and the values at the core of your company.
Establish Your Brand Color Palette
Color plays a pivotal role in shaping brand perception and evoking specific emotions in your audience. Carefully chosen brand colors can significantly impact how customers perceive and engage with your business. Establishing a cohesive palette is a crucial step in building a recognizable brand identity through photography.
It helps to explore the psychology of color and the impact this has on brand perception – understanding the connections can help you select colors that represent your brand and feature heavily in your photos.
It’s important that your photos incite the feelings you want your audience to connect with your brand and products or services, so consider this when opting for tones and color palettes. A calming, high quality feel requires higher exposure footage with a larger depth of field, while warm tones and minimalist images evoke luxury and relaxation. However, if you want to create a sense of excitement or your business targets a younger demographic, you may want to choose brighter colors and sharper focus.
Cohesive Composition
Composition plays a key role in the aesthetics of your images, so it should form part of your strategy when building a brand identity. Businesses should avoid staged photos and use more engaging images that show the result of using a product or service rather than the product itself. You also need to avoid clutter in images, leaving plenty of space for logos in the corner of your images and keeping the narrative of each image succinct and natural. This will help you to create coherent visuals that align with your brand image.
It can help to create a mood board of images from competitors you like so you can see the overarching theme within those shots. Are they dynamic and engaging or elegant and luxurious? How do these competitors use composition to evoke those feelings? There are various techniques to consider with composition, from leading lines to symmetry and rule of thirds, so try to identify the common themes you want to include in your own marketing shots.
Tell a Story
Each aspect of photography can help brands illuminate their story and core message, so you need to know what story you’re trying to tell with your images. You may want to show customers that you’re reliable and trustworthy – your images in this case may need to feel editorial, with timely and newsworthy images. This reportage style will give your brand more credibility and relevance.
Perhaps you want to show that you’re eco-conscious and sustainability is a core value for you, in which case your images should be focused on eco topics that resonate with climate crisis-focused audiences. Be clear on the story you want to convey as this will inform the types of images you shoot and publish. Thematic elements can span a wide range of components, from props and backgrounds to locations and styling choices, and they can help contribute to a consistent and memorable visual language.
Craft a Consistently Evolving Identity
Embracing the power of visual storytelling is integral to crafting an enduring brand. Whatever the goal of your images, your brand identity needs to be clear and concise so consider how photographs and videos play into your wider strategy. From marketing materials to social media or website content, you want all your visual assets to have the same tone and style so that customers can see your brand represented straight away.
As your business grows and evolves, your brand photography style guide should adapt accordingly. Regularly review and update your guide to reflect any changes in your brand’s direction, product offerings, or target audience. Treat your visual identity as a living, breathing entity that evolves alongside your business, always striving to maintain a strong and recognizable aesthetic.
