Pay Attention to the Small Things

Great web site design concentrates on the small picture as well as the big picture. Little things like icons and graphics turn a web site into a memorable browsing experience. The next time you’re looking into a new product that you might purchase take a look at the company’s web site and look at their visuals. More often than not, if they have great images or icons they probably have a great product – look here & here. The thinking is if you’re going to spend hours, days, and weeks obsessing over the graphic imagery of your web site, you’ve probably spent twice as long designing a great product that will satisfy you’re customers.

I just returned from a trip back to the Bay Area to help one of 2 Out of Three’s clients with this idea – delivery on the small things. We spent four marathon days capturing creative and high quality product and lifestyle images for the Neela Bags‘ website, which will be launching in the next few weeks.

We went into the four days of shooting with ideas for eight different types of shots at six separate locations around the cities of San Mateo and Burlingame. Everything from detailed product shots, to lifestyle shots, to images of the company’s founders we’re taken. It’s fun to look at some of the numbers involved in our 4 days of shooting.

• 1 lightbox
• 1 malfunctioning Nikon SB 800 external flash (probably user error)
• 2 different rolls of white photo paper
• 2 lifestyle models
• 3 fluorescent lights with stands
• 6 locations
• 7.5 Gigs of data generated
• 8 different bag styles + 6 different colors
• 1248 digital images captures in both jpeg and RAW format

From all the images shot, we will most likely use less than 50 for the different mediums of web, print, and a few places in between. I’d love to show a sneak peak of the pictures, but I don’t want to spoil the web sites launch. In the meantime here are a few shots of the us working on the small picture.