Art direction gives imagery a job: orient, explain, establish trust, or create a controlled emotional cue. It is not a list of adjectives.
Set the visual job before selecting assets
Write a one-line stance: audience, moment, desired response, and what imagery communicates that copy cannot. Choose one primary treatment and fallback: documentary detail, diagrammatic illustration, editorial crop, icon system, or no image.
| Decision | Specify | Reject when |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | people, object, place, or abstract concept | it repeats the headline without adding evidence |
| Point of view | distance, angle, energy, inclusion | it turns a serious task into decoration |
| Composition | focal zone, text-safe area, responsive crop | the message disappears at narrow widths |
| Surface | palette, texture, line weight, lighting | it conflicts with product semantic states |
| Rights | source, license, attribution, expiry | ownership or reuse is unknown |
Turn the stance into an asset contract
For each asset, record source, allowed use, focal subject, wide/narrow crop anchors, overlay, and alt decision. Without an approved library, deliver a search or commissioning brief—not fabricated filenames or claimed licenses.
- Make the narrow crop independently legible; do not assume a desktop crop merely shrinks.
- Reserve readable text space in the composition before applying an overlay.
- Prefer a coherent series over unrelated stock images. Inclusion must be credible to the subject and setting.
- Use decorative alt only when removing the image loses no task-relevant information. Otherwise state the information in concise alt text or adjacent copy.
Prove it in the rendered layout
Show wide and narrow compositions with real headline, navigation, and state colors. Check crop survival, overlay contrast, repeated-card noise, and icon legibility at rendered size.
Deliver a treatment board: stance, primary/fallback, two assets or search terms, crop notes, rights status, alt strategy, and reject criterion. Source URLs, licenses, and approval status are evidence, not ornamental credits.
Use decision records when competing treatments require a documented trade-off.
Favicons and app icons
Ship an SVG favicon primary (<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">)
with a PNG fallback. Derive the mark from the stance; test at 16×16 pixels—a bold glyph
outperforms a detailed logo. Apple Touch Icon (180), manifest icons (192/512), and OG
preview are separate deliverables with their own crop/contrast needs. See
patterns.
Ship check
- The treatment explains a product or content need that copy alone cannot.
- Every selected image has source, rights, crop, and alt decisions.
- The narrow composition and text-over-image state have been reviewed.
- A missing or unlicensed asset is represented as a brief, not an invented deliverable.
Contract (generated)
Canonical detail: contract.json.
- Route: A product needs a committed imagery, illustration, or iconography system with source and rights decisions.; avoid: The request is only a color, type, or layout decision.
- Exclude: Do not use placeholder imagery when the brief requires a real asset plan. (+1 in contract.json)
- Stop / handoff: Stop when source or rights constraints cannot be verified. (+1 in contract.json); receives [design-system-interview, improve-existing-website, tasteroll] -> sends [responsive-layout, a11y-pass, deslop-ui, tastecheck-pass]
- Output: source-aware visual treatment and asset plan
- Evidence:
table_with_evidencewithstatus,reason,remediation,evidence,provenance.