Well-placed Images can tell a story more effectively than words. Many designers underestimate the value of photography in web design.
Why is this important? Photography can set the mood for a design. When it comes to web and mobile digital products, photography is one of the most powerful tools for establishing how a brand expresses itself.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when using photography in UI design:
Stick with high-quality photos
Bad photos will ruin a design, even if everything else looks great. If your design requires photography and you are not a talented photographer, you have two options: hire a professional photographer or use high-quality photography.
There are tons of great resources out there where you can buy quality photos. There are even sites that offer High Contrast Images for free. I will provide you with a list of resources at the end of this article.
Make sure any text has consistent contrast
Have you ever tried to put a headline on a big hero image and it was hard to read? That’s because the problem is the image. Photos can be very dynamic, with lots of really light areas and lots of really dark areas.
If you must use a certain photo, you can resolve the contrast issue with one of these techniques:
- Add an overlay
- Lower the contrast of the image
- Color the image.
- Add a drop shadow to your text
Use only relevant images
Not all images enhance the experience. Some of them just take up space or at worst confuse the user.
Users react to images faster than text, so make sure your content matches supporting images. You need to select images that have a strong relationship to your product goals and make sure they are relevant to the context.
Use high-resolution photos
Low-resolution images can have a significant impact on your users. Sometimes this can be the result of not optimizing your images correctly or choosing small images and then enlarging them.
In any case, make sure that your photos are not blurry or pixelated. When downloading a photo you need to remember: the higher the resolution, the better.
Repeating visual motifs
Good design has unity: it comes together as one entity, with each element supporting the others structurally and viscerally. That is a difficult goal to achieve. But your design will look much better if you try to make your photography look similar.
Platforms for free photos:
Hopefully, after reading this article, you feel much more confident about using photography effectively in your user interface design. Here are some stock photography sites to explore if you don’t have the means to hire a photographer:
Unsplash
The photos are so professional and attractive that you might not think that everything is free! You can see that they hand-select each photo and accept only the best one.
Bouns Design:
You can download more than 5K high-contrast images for free from Bouns Design.
Pexels
It’s also a great website with photos that are well-tagged, searchable, and easy to discover through their Discover pages.
Pixabay
If you didn’t find what you were looking for on the above websites, you can try Pixabay.