The importance of quality visuals – Patrick McHugh

Patrick McHugh spoke at Showcase your Creative Work Effectively – a Creative Exchange that took place in Sligo and Ennis in April 2016.

Patrick’s presentation focused on the importance of quality visuals and the role that these play when establishing professional relationships with clients and the media, nationally and internationally.

He pointed out that planning good visual content is as important as developing a good, functional product: “If you have good images – if you set time aside to curate your visual content – those images are out there and they’ll be working for you as you are sleeping, they’ll be working for you while you are on holiday. They’ll always be working”. This is particularly true in the context of a global marketplace, as Patrick explains below:

Good visuals – whether they are on a website or social media pages – help businesses get noticed, Patrick explains: “I often tell my clients to take 5 to 10 photographs that can effectively illustrate their brands, without relying on any text”.

Before taking these pictures, it is important to answer specific questions:  What is your brand? If you were to stand in front a group of people, what would you tell them about your brand? Which key message do you want to convey? What kind of visuals do you need in order to illustrate that message? With this in mind, Patrick argued, “if are going to spend money on a shoot, you’d have thought about it, you’d have an effective plan for the day and the money you’ll invest would be more effective”.