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 he first question usually asked regarding a new book
is, "What is it all about?" Genre and plot are to be defined
before we dive into the artistic subtleties of photography,
too. When searching for an image in a stock photo catalog,
you're supposed to enter keywords describing the content, rather than
appearance or style, of the photo you need.
The idea that comes to mind immediately is to use a photo to picture
the same object that your page describes with words. I bet you
have already thought about it if your site markets some tangible
product, such as cars or computers. (Even a piece of software,
although not very tangible by itself, may prove photogenic thanks to
its packaging box.) In these simple cases, design
considerations are secondary: You need photos simply because your
visitors would like to see the thing before ordering it.
The same reasoning applies to portraits of site maintainers or
company staff, shots of corporate office and buildings, etc.
Although not directly connected to sales, this sort of photography
can communicate a more friendly image of your company, and if
surfers find your site useful they won't object to downloading a
couple of extra "here-we-are" photos. Again, in this case
they'll be interested in the content of these photos, not their
design role.
However, most web sites are not about selling anything palpable, and
most photo images on the Web aren't there only for delivering
information. What if you're making a site for an insurance
company? Or a home page of a University Department of
Philosophy? Maybe photography isn't at all suitable for
illustrating such abstract topics? This sort of challenge is
often faced by logo designers who
have to make up recognizable symbols for all kinds of commercial or
non-commercial entities.
Surprisingly, with photography it is often easier to come up
with an illustration that won't seem irrelevant. Probably the
reason is that our eyes got used to the plethora of irrelevant
details in the real life, and photography being the closest
reproduction of the life around us, it is enough to add just a touch
of purposefulness for a photo to become meaningful and fit the
topic. In other words, if a photo is nice by itself and fits
your design, it requires very little---if any---topic
relevance. |
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Have a look at the site of an advertisement agency called
WWS. The splash page features a
large photo---but what's in there? It's not an example of the
company's work, nor a portrait of its CEO or founder, nor a shot of
their corporate headquarters. It's a seemingly irrelevant
retro-style black-and-white photo of phone operators at work.
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Only at the very end of the copy text we're hinted that this is a
(rather vague) symbol of the web site machinery and links. And
it works! Our attention is drawn to the unusual image; we feel that
there was some reason for putting it there, although not
immediately obvious, and we're eager to find out more by clicking
our way into the site.
This technique of seemingly irrelevant photo illustrations is quite
common in modern design and, when tastefully done, is able to
communicate a creative and artistic image of the company.
Emphasizing these qualities may not be the first priority in your
case, but as I argued elsewhere you
cannot but profit by learning from professional designers---even if
they seem "too artistic" to you at a first glance.
In web design, there's one common design element that is a good
candidate for applying photography---namely the icons of different
sections of your site, both in their section headers and in
navigation panel buttons. For this
sort of graphics, purely symbolic logo-like drawings have two
disadvantages: They're either unoriginal (e.g. a "Home"
icon with a gable-roof and a chimney) or unrecognizable.
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A good method of overcoming this difficulty is exemplified by
Image
Club Graphics. Parts of their site are represented by small
photographic images, and not all of them are very relevant: What is
the idea behind, for example, a cup of coffee as a symbol of
"Product Index," and a star, of "What's New"? Looks like it
could just as well be the other way round.
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But nevertheless, these images do not annoy or distract. They
don't seem irrelevant because we usually require relevance from
symbols (remember Liska?)
while these photos are less symbols than they are "live beings,"
life-like and self-sufficient enough to compensate for some lack of
relevance.
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Photographic labels for site sections don't need to lie about
scattered. The Mining Company
has gathered a number of stock photo images of people into an
impressive "crowd" serving as a center of the navigation composition
on their "About Us" page. Such a concentration of
expressive faces and limbs makes for a surprisingly involving
page. The callouts
here are participating in the same (ir)relevance game by pointing,
in a "don't-you-see-it's-obvious" fashion, at some random parts of
the image.
As you can judge from the above, when it doesn't truly matter what
images to use, the photos of people work best. That's no
surprise. In any room we always turn our attention first to human
beings, not to inanimate objects; that's why a human face on a photo
is such a sure eye-catcher. But picturing recognizable faces
and objects isn't the only value of photography. |
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Even a small fragment of a photo
with no identifiable objects in it will show subtle and complex
gradations and shadings, nearly unachievable by any amount of
painting or Photoshop effects. In my article on textures,
photos are subdivided into a whole texture class of its own,
thanks to the complex non-linear color transitions characteristic to
photography. A clever designer can make
good use of these subtleties.
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