Photography is major part of design which I feel I don’t think about enough. While I do use photography, I often forget just how important it is and how useful it can be at creating effective design. I espeically feel I need to consider composition more in photography, as I can clearly see how effective the Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratio are, but I rarely utilise them.
As stated before, photography can’t be overlooked when creating design. In design, photography has several uses, and understanding what you want a photograph to do in your design can allow you to take better photographs, and have them utilised more effectively. I’m to investigate into the ways photography can be used in design and find examples of them being used and not being used.
Add Interest and Attractiveness
While it may sound obvious, a photo should look good. Photography can be used to assist the visuals of what you are photographing through composition and lighting, which will help make people want what is in the photo. This is particularly important in any food related photography, as a bad photograph can make food extremely unattractive. I found both good and bad examples of this from local restaurants instagram pages. On the left the photography is at strange angles, has poor or unconsidered lighting, and has no regard for surroundings or composition. The photos on the right however are much better, using proper lighting, composition, and angles. What’s amazing to me is that the photos on the left really aren’t as bad as they could be, but could still be so much better.
Enhancing the User Experience
Photography can be used to enhance the User Experience by incorporating it into the design. A great example of this I found was on Apple’s page for the new MacBook Air. The photography is incorporate in dynamic and genius ways which makes for a much more premium feeling experience when looking at the laptop. I especially like how Apple animates their photography, which adds an extra level of engagement.
Illustrate Products
Apple also use photography to illustrate their product on the showcase. By showing the side of the laptop it helps to emphasise the key selling factor of the Air, the thinness. This usage of illustrative photography is really effective and helps the users understand the key selling point of the Air.
Communicate Information and Data
Apple utilise this style of perfectly aligned photography a lot to communicate information and data and I think it’s really effective. It’s a beautifully angled photo and shows users exactly what they want to see. This is also far more engaging than having the ports be presented in just a list or illustration as it makes users trust that what they are seeing is real.
Create a Brand Personality
Apple uses some great photography to build their brand. For example from this photo you can tell the product meant to be a lifestyle, with extremely welcoming surroundings and people. The key part of this image is the apple logo mark, which reinforces the brand while not being overwhelming.
DALL.E is an AI image generator capable of producing new images from text prompts and is able to expand images based on the contents. While DALL.E 1 was relatively bare bones and only really capable of producing stylised images, DALL.E 2 is far more power, capable of producing incredibly realistic images at 4x the resolution. I’m really interested in the use of AI in the future, not out of a sense of using it to replace things, but rather to assist and help through the speed at which it can understand information. I also find the ethical concerns of AI to be fascinating, due to how any image produced by AI is created by looking at trends in Art, meaning that the AI is essentially copying the style of another Artist. While this may sound like an obvious violation of copyright, I don’t fully agree. Art has always been influenced by other artists, creating something new in an existing style has happened for as long as art has existed, so as long as its not copying another artists work entirely. Also, there is an argument that AI will cause the end of creativity, but really AI can only create Art based on the trends it sees, so there will always be a need for human creativity.
I’ve been experimenting with DALL.E 2 myself as part of my project work and the results have been incredible. It’s definitely a bit tricky to figure out at first what text prompts you need to give to expand an image, but when you get it right it works incredibly. Overall, I’m really excited to be able to utilise DALL.E 2 in my project and just generally see it’s application in the future.