Creating Inspiring And Consistent Meet The Team Imagery

With the rise of remote working, it has become slightly more difficult to achieve a consistent look and feel for staff or team photos.

This week’s swipe and deploy looks at meet the team pages. Sharing some inspiring ones along with some tips on retaining consistency when you can’t physically get everyone together.

A platform For Your Team And Colleagues

Practically every B2B website has a meet the team page, and they vary a lot in terms of look and feel. Some have a group photo, whilst others have individual profile shots.

Something that often comes up in conversation with businesses is them being unsure of which photos to use, or they are waiting for new photos to be taken before pushing live.

There is almost always a delay due to photography for these pages. But there doesn’t need to be. Remember it’s digital, and it can always be updated!

Where To Look To Seek Inspiration?

Looking at football clubs and other sports team websites can be a great source of inspiration, and can show you how simple they can be.

A trend that many of the clubs adopt is to use cutouts of the players, meaning that they can apply them to a consistent background or graphic.

See Manchester United’s player imagery above, and West Ham’s below.

West Ham have injected some personality into theirs, and although they appear to have all been taken together, some have been added at a later date, when new players have been signed. The photos have the background removed and are then placed alongside the others where they look perfectly consistent. This is the golden nugget.

New People Can Be Added Whilst Retaining Consistency

When new players are signed and they are added alongside their existing team members with ease. B2B brands can implement the same consistent approach when new team members join. Even better, they don’t need to be working in the same office or have pictures taken by the same photographer.

With the ability to remove backgrounds, people can take their own photos and send them to the agency or marketing team to adapt and place them on the website.

The example above is from the website of a client of ours called Farleygreene. We provided them with the outline concept and tasked their marketing team with uploading transparent PNGs at 1:1 ratio. When the photos are uploaded they are displayed over the branded backdrop, meaning that all the photos appear consistent, despite them originally having different backgrounds.

Get More Creative

Removing backgrounds is not essential. If you want to inject a bit of personality you could try adding a branded asset over the top of the photos. Whether it’s embedded in the image (and requires a little Photoshop wizardry) or you get your agency to add the asset when uploaded. The example above is from Wonde.

The example above is from SEO agency Dark Horse. They’ve rallied together to produce a creative yet unified look. Although this appears to have been done as a single photo shoot, it could have easily been done with each team member independently applying their war paint and taking a photo at home.

You could ask Katie Turnbull, their marketing lead, if this was a staged shoot or individual. I’d certainly be curious.

What’s To Swipe and Deploy?

For remote workers and those in hybrid roles, getting your team together can sometimes be a real challenge. However, the majority of brands seek to have consistent backdrops to provide a more unified appearance.

With a little creativity and imagination, you can add some character to your website without spending heavily on fancy photoshoots or technical functionality and development time. 

A little tool we always recommend is Remove.bg. It can automatically remove the background of photos to help with cutouts for team profiles and other pages too. It continues to rank near the top for accuracy on tricky details like hair and flyaway edges. Worth knowing its free tier has become more limited since I first wrote this post, so if you’re processing more than a handful of photos, it’s worth also trying tools you may already have access to. Canva’s background remover, Adobe Express, and Photoshop’s built-in subject selection have all become genuinely capable free alternatives if you’re already paying for those platforms for other reasons.

But I challenge you to get more creative with your meet the team page! Don’t fear it not being perfect, as you can always change and adapt it. Most importantly don’t wait until everyone is together. With the right instructions, your team can take a photo and with a few simple tools you can deliver a consistent look and feel for your profile pages.

Maintenance doesn’t need to be difficult either. Remove.bg can cut out the background automatically, and you can use your Photoshop or Figma skills to add some brand pizzazz. Whether it’s with logos or brand shapes in the background, you can add character and personality to your team page without creating something that’s too time intensive to maintain.

Want A Meet The Team Page With Some Impact?

If this post has got you excited by the idea of adding a Meet The Team page to your website that has personality but is also easy to manage, give us a call or drop us a message. We help brands extend and evolve their WordPress and WooCommerce websites.

That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #13 Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web. 

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