Generate the illustration. Photograph the workshop.
Article art, backgrounds, concepts and variations, produced in an afternoon for a fraction of what a stock library or a commissioned illustrator costs. Anything a reader would take as a record of your business stays in front of a camera.
In short: Generated images are excellent for illustration, abstract backgrounds, concept work and testing variations. They are the wrong tool for anything documentary. We work to a style spec so a set holds together, and we tell you plainly where the tools still fall down.
Where generation is the obvious answer
Every content program hits the same wall. The article is written and it needs a picture. The stock libraries have four hundred variations of a handshake and nothing resembling the specific idea you spent two thousand words explaining. So somebody picks the least embarrassing option, and a year later the site is decorated with images that mean nothing. Generated illustration solves that particular problem well, because the whole point is that the image did not exist before and does not need to correspond to a real scene.
The economics also change what you can attempt. Producing eight versions of an ad visual to test against each other used to be a budget decision. Now it is an afternoon. Same with concept work: showing a client three directions before anyone commissions a photographer is cheaper and faster than arguing about it in words. The saving is real, and it is largest exactly where the image is decorative or exploratory rather than evidential.
Editorial illustration
Article headers and section art that carry the actual idea in the piece, in one consistent style, instead of a stock photo of somebody pointing at a whiteboard.
Backgrounds and texture
Abstract hero backdrops, section dividers, patterns and gradients built to your palette, sized for the breakpoints they will actually be used at.
Concepts before commitment
Rough directions for a campaign, a packaging idea or a page layout, made cheaply enough that being wrong twice costs nothing but a morning.
Variations for testing
The same visual idea in six treatments, so the creative decision gets made by the results rather than by whoever spoke last in the meeting.
Nothing a reader would take as documentary
This is the line, and we hold it without exceptions. We will not generate your premises, your staff, your finished work or your products. A generated photo of a workshop you do not have is a claim a customer may eventually stand inside. The same goes for a team photo of people who were never hired, an installation you never carried out, and a product shot of an item whose real proportions differ from the picture. These are not stylistic choices. They are statements of fact made in a medium people still read as evidence.
The practical consequences arrive faster than most people expect. Advertising standards bodies and consumer protection rules treat a misleading image the way they treat a misleading sentence. Ad platforms have their own rules on top of that. And the ordinary version of getting caught is simply a customer walking into your building and noticing it is not the one on your homepage. When a page genuinely needs a picture of the real thing, the answer is a half-day with a photographer, and we will say so rather than sell you a generation package. Where the images are real, we spend the effort on filenames, alt text and compression instead, which is part of the SEO work anyway.
Consistency across a set, and the limits nobody advertises
One good image is easy. Twelve that look like they belong to the same brand is the actual craft. Generated sets drift: the lighting warms up, the line weight thickens, the palette wanders two steps away from yours by image nine. We work against a written style specification, reuse reference images and seeds, generate far more than we need, and then have one person select and correct the final set in sequence. Selection is most of the job. The volume is only useful because it gives you something to reject.
Some things these tools still do not do reliably, and you should know that before you budget for them. Text inside an image is unreliable, particularly at small sizes and in longer strings, so we set type over the image rather than baking it in. Precise brand marks come out nearly right, which is worse than absent, so real logos get composited in afterwards from your files. Exact product likeness is out of reach, because a model has never seen your specific item and will produce a confident approximation of it. Hands, mechanical assemblies and any object where a reader knows how the parts fit together are where the errors show first. And there is a licensing and provenance question worth deciding deliberately, so we agree the tools and the terms with you at the start rather than after the images are live. The same reasoning drives how we handle content marketing assets generally.
What we won’t do
Pass generated pictures off as photographs of your business
No premises, no staff, no completed jobs, no product shots. If the page needs the real thing, we will tell you to hire a photographer, even though that is work we do not get paid for.
Put an unsourced statistic into a graphic
Charts and infographics make numbers look settled. So every figure in one has to come from your own data or a named source we can cite in the caption, and if it does not, the graphic changes rather than the standard.
Manufacture reviews, testimonials or customer faces
No invented testimonials, no generated portraits standing in for real customers, no fabricated review screenshots. A face attached to praise nobody gave is a lie with a photograph on it.
Which of your images should be generated, and which need a camera?
Send us the pages you are unhappy with. We will split them into the two lists and give you a straight answer on both.
For illustration and abstract work, a line in the image credit or page footer is usually enough and we recommend it. For anything that could be mistaken for a photograph of real people or places, labelling is not the fix – we simply do not make that image.
Can you match our existing brand style?
Usually yes, if the style is describable and you have examples. We build a written style specification, work from reference images, and select the final set in sequence so it does not drift. Exact logo reproduction is done by compositing your real files, never by generation.
Why not just generate our product photography?
Because a model has never seen your product and will produce a confident approximation of it. Proportions, finish and detail will be subtly wrong, and the customer finds out when the box arrives. Real product shots are worth the photographer.
Who owns the images and can we use them in ads?
That depends on which tool produced them and under what terms, so we agree the toolset and licensing with you before we start rather than afterwards. Ad platforms also apply their own rules to synthetic imagery, and we check the current ones for your channels.
