Imagery direction

Principle

Photography, illustration, diagrams, and synthetic images have different jobs. Choose the medium from communication intent, not novelty or convenience.

Decision contract

Use photography for credible people, place, process, or documentary proof; use illustration for abstraction, impossible worlds, sensitive anonymity, or a controlled visual grammar; use diagrams for explanation. Mixed media requires an explicit composition rule.

Every asset records purpose, subject, source, creator, license, territory, expiry, releases/consent, synthetic-media status, manipulation disclosure, focal point, safe crop regions, dominant colors, alt text or decorative status, sensitive-content note, and owner.

Direction and representation

Show people with agency in plausible contexts. Avoid tokenism, stereotype, poverty tourism, staged “authenticity,” inaccessible props, and cultural symbols without review. Diversity must exist across the collection, not be loaded into one image. Never infer identity attributes from appearance.

Crop and accessibility

Protect faces, hands, essential action, text, and cultural markers across aspect ratios. Art direction may change crops, never meaning. Alt text conveys the image's job in context; captions carry attribution or information not available visually.

QA evidence

Rights and consent gate; focal-point previews at every target ratio; low-vision and forced-colors review; text-overlay contrast; bandwidth/resolution variants; representation review; synthetic-media disclosure; expiry automation.