Imagery (Brand)
Imagery is the photography and illustration style a brand uses to picture its world and curate a particular visual mood.
What is brand imagery?
Imagery refers to the specific photography or illustration style a brand uses in order to visualise why it exists and what it believes in. Deeper than the selection of imagery itself, it also covers the creative strategy of how something is shot, styled or treated.
A brand's imagery is often the most emotionally loaded part of its identity, shaping how it feels on a more human level. The right photograph or illustration style has the ability to signal the exact mood or story that a brand wants to be associated with.
Since our brains process visual information much faster than text, brands with a strongly defined imagery style are able to communicate more effectively with their audience. However, that level of interpretation means creating strict guardrails around imagery is essential.
What makes a strong imagery style?
Clear strategic direction
A brand's positioning and personality should influence the kind of feelings and moods that its imagery needs to convey. Without any concrete strategy, a brand has no context for the visual world its building.
A distinctive point of view
Focus on building a brand world that will resonate with your target audience without it veering into visual cues that the competition has already established. The best imagery styles feel so signature that you connect them to a brand without its logo being present.
Consistency of treatment
Get into the specifics. For photography: lighting, staging, textures, props, models, colour grading, framing and styling. For illustration: colour palettes, sizing, proportion, line weight, texture, shape and form. Rules should bring continuity to your imagery while giving people the freedom to add to it.
Documentation
Brand guidelines should have detailed instructions on maintaining the chosen imagery style, so that creative teams land the same tone from a social post to a billboard.
How brand imagery works in practice: Trellis
Compiling decades of medical history in minutes, Trellis seamlessly turns years of appointments, vaccinations, genetics and everything else into the record of your lifetime.
But it wasn't performance that the brand's visual universe needed to capture. This living blueprint needed something that came much more natural: humanity.
Trellis
Bucking the trend of posed, clinical imagery often associated with health-tech, Trellis draws from a library of natural, sunlit photography—images which celebrate lives through pregnancy and beyond with a diverse range of people, ages and families at every stage of Generational Health.
It's one of the chief elements of the brand's flexible grid identity, which toggles and expands in a way that's true to life itself.
Outcome: An imagery style distinct enough to be a positioning tool, reinforcing Trellis' claim as the Mother of all healthcare apps.
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