Look at any business website or magazine and you will see just how many lazy and obvious illustrations are used as visual language. You can pick any profession; they all have their crimes. In finance, for instance, this might be a golden egg to illustrate wealth.
Elsewhere, you only need to know the profession and you can guess the most overused image:
– Insurance: Umbrellas, globes, padlocks, shaking hands
– Banking: Piggy banks, saplings growing in the palm of a hand
– Car Hire: Road signs, steering wheels
In some instances, you can revive a long-forgotten symbol that would once have been a cliche. For instance, in the Content Cloud video we visually identify writers with quill pens. I’m not sure but it has probably been a good 100 years since any writer used one of those… Symbolic images are used for instant recognition and sometimes that can be done cleverly, like a quill pen to identify a writer. You’ll have noticed that we haven’t used any clouds.
Often websites are built with picture blocks that have to be filled for every story. The designers should have known picture content would have been difficult so should have designed with options to not have an image. Rather than leave the web writer searching for rubbish free images, designers can come up with a library of icons or themes to fill the spaces, which would also add some cohesion to these often random collections of images.
Here is our selection of cliches, and please feel free to send in suggestions for more. The banks are looking positive with intriguing and well shot images. Lloyds’ use of icons is particularly strong.
Maybe its an accountancy thing but EY have rallied into the lead with a lighthouse and possibly the worst crime ever, an adult and child’s hands holding a new shoot. Really?
Ewan Buck is design director at Progressive Content
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