Imagery
Photography and iconography are a foundational part of the Launch brand expression. How we choose and apply them is key to the integrity of our brand. And that means NO group high-fives.
Photography
Photography is immediate. It’s the first thing a reader sees. The tone of your carefully chosen colors, fonts, and words can all be overlooked — or worse, misunderstood — if they’re paired with a bad photo.
Every photo featured in a Launch communication should answer a simple question: Does this photo feel like Launch? Is there action? Are there bold colors? Does it evoke feelings of exploration and discovery and charging forward? Photos should be exciting and stirring! If you’re presenting about your client’s awesome new data platform, don’t think “guy working on a laptop.” Find a picture that represents how your clients feel when they use their new platform.
Photos in Launch-branded materials should embody creativity, brand identity, and meaningful storytelling. As an AI-driven consulting agency, our prevailing imagery should be AI-generated. Tapping into keywords like “connectivity,” “data,” and “magenta” will go a long way in searching up / creating on-brand imagery. And whenever people, cities, or recognizable elements are intentionally featured, those images should inspire, evoke emotion, and convey a clear sense of purpose, all while maintaining cohesion across a single document.
Royalty-free photo resources like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay are great places to source images for your documents. However, when selecting images, remember that Launch is not a typical consulting company — our photography should feel fresh, thoughtful, and authentic, never clichéd or staged. Avoid 3D or childlike illustrations, overly simplistic or monotone visuals, images lacking meaning or detail, overly obvious concepts, or “heroic” stock poses. Also, no clip art (no matter what Clippy says).
Iconography
The Launch brand doesn’t use icons heavily, but they can be a nice way to liven up an otherwise unadorned or copy-dense page. Like our fonts, our icons leverage our free-to-use Microsoft Office 365 libraries. All Office apps come with a library of stock icons to choose from. They’re built into the apps – simply search for an icon based on any relevant term.
Color your icons with flat colors only, and in a way that works well with the rest of the content on your page (see the Color page for more help on that). Remember, the gradient is reserved only for the Launch logo and as a full-bleed background on title slides in a presentation.