Fulfillment Guide

This guide is intended to help you make the most of your new brand and food photography. It covers digital and print applications, technical considerations, and offers guidance on maintaining a consistent visual brand identity.

The most important tip is that good fulfillment begins before the shoot takes place, when you want to think hard about what is in and what is out of the scope of the shoot, about consistency, and about style.

We will meet with you to talk about your goals and the scope of the work we will undertake. We will also talk about branding style and colors that we will want to adhere to throughout the shoot (colors of plates, garnish, backgrounds). And for food we will talk about shooting angles and lighting, to ensure we create a consistent look.

General Guidelines

• When we share your final gallery, create a shared digital folder (on Google Drive or Dropbox, etc.) and copy all your images there, so you can share them with other team members or creatives
• Our galleries are all the images in highest resolution; if you like, we can create and share an export of all images at a web-friendlier resolution
• Maintain the original, high-resolution original files in an “untouched” folder, so you can always revert to them if need be
• Create multiple image sizes / crops for different social platforms where you post, and organized the images by size/platform or other useful characteristic.
• Develop a naming convention for easy image retrieval, be it by name of the dish, mood of the shot, color palette, etc.
• Backup all original photo files in at least two secure locations (we will also keep the originals in the online gallery we shared)
• Website
• Replace your homepage hero images and all existing food and interior shots, or just integrate the new images into your new website, if this is a new build.
• Before uploading, ensure images are optimized for web loading speed (we can help with that); we will optimize the images we send you in web resolution, if you ask for that, but these will all be saved at the same size, which will still be pretty large for most needs; you will want to resize images based on their actual usage size, to ensure you are keeping your site’s bandwidth down.
• Be sure to use the img tag variables in a web SEO friendly way (tag the image with a description indicating what is shown in it – what dish or drink or view)

Social Media

• Develop a content calendar that strategically incorporates your new photography going forward – we are big fans of Loomly for scheduling social media posts; schedule posts a month or more in advance at a time, but spread the scheduled posts out so you can also pepper your feed with immediately posted items about what is going on during a particular day.

• Don’t just post one thing. Create a mix of food, interior, and lifestyle brand images for variety.

• Focus on story. Rather than just posting a picture of your Eggs Benedict, tell a story about someone who came in, didn’t know what to have, got a recc from the waiter to try Eggs Benny and was wowed. The new images are not the story, they are illustrations for the ongoing story of your brand.

• Develop consistent hashtag strategies that complement your new visuals.

Print

• If you have a printed menu, update with new food photography (this is also a great time to consider a redesign of your menu)
• Redesign business cards, flyers, and promotional materials to use the imagery
• Think about usages in things like signage, rack cards, takeout and delivery packaging graphics, any swag, etc.

Going Forward

• Track how the new imagery is doing vs. old images, and get customer feedback that the images represent their experience with your brand.
• If your menu or interior changes regularly, consider scheduling a reshoot of changed items/elements a year into the future, and plan towards that.

On Your Brand

• Your brand is not your visual identity, by which we mean your logo, your colors, your fonts, even the photos we will capture together.

• Your brand is your reputation.

• Your brand is what people say about you after you leave the room. It is how interacting with you makes people feel, how well you solve the problems they have. It is people’s psychological, emotional, and, yes, commercial relationship with your company. Do they know, like, and trust you? Are you memorable?

• At the root of all branding are the questions: What makes you different? What is your ‘why’? What is your story and how are you sharing it?

Final Thoughts

• The purpose of your new images is to help you make (or to continue making) a positive digital footprint.
• Good imagery should help you catch people at hello, it should draw them in.
• Good imagery should align with your positioning, your ‘why,’ and motivate people to engage with your company, to become ‘true fans’ who help spread the word to others.