Where does photography fit into the branding process? Great question, right? So let’s stop and see how photography fits into the puzzle that is branding your business.

Photography is just a piece of the overall branding puzzle this is why you will meet so many different people who can specialize in many areas that help make up your overall brand for your business. These people can be branding specialists, website designers, graphics designers, brand photographers, the list goes on and on.

So let’s start with wrapping our minds around the fact that a brand isn’t an actual thing. You can’t grab it, hold it or use it per say. Having a brand is a combination of your visuals, marketing, values, color or mood, style and so forth.

When you look at your brand to change it, create it or enhance it you may wonder where a Photographer might fit in and when you would need one. Most of the time your branding process will look something like this:

1. First, you need a strong business vision. This for you is probably the first thing you thought of. What you want to do with your business, the kind of impact you’re going to make and how your product will stand out from the others on the market.
2. Second, you need to develop your brand identity. Your brand identity would be things like your logo, fonts, tagline, shapes, etc. You might work with someone on a mood board to help identify these key things and have them in one nice layout. This layout is valuable because you can share with people like me, the photographer, or your website designer.
3. Next, you need a good website designer. They’re going to work with you on the client experience and what your site will look like. From this you can also see where images would go, what kind of images might fit best on certain pages and so forth. The website designer will likely will provide you with a mockup site for this part (something you can share with the photographer to help communicate what you need.) While that is going on you can move on to the next step…
4. The photographer!! You will want to seek out a few people to identify the right photographer to fit your style but this is the fun and important part of the process. You will partner with the brand photographer to create the images – pick a location, style, props, etc. that are going to compliment your brand, your personal style and the design of your website.
5. Lastly to tie the images and overall design together you may need a graphics designer. Some times your website designer and graphics designer are the same person. If you’re unsure they can help ask! This person will help with the finishing touches on graphics, and placement of your images within your new site, marketing materials, etc.

So now that you’ve seen one way that the process can go you can move forward feeling more confident about working with a brand photographer. If you’re past the branding phase though and still need to figure out if you’re ready to hire a brand photographer, click here, for my tips on how to know when you’re ready to hire a brand photographer.

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