It’s taken as read that having good quality product pictures is vital in ecommerce, particularly with products that have a strong visual element. We always recommend that clients take the time to have professional photographs taken and that product pictures are kept to a uniform shape and size. Usually this is enough, but sometimes it take a bit of creativity to really convey your product through an image.

We’ve been working on a site that sells a product called Crazy Color hair dye, the client had some professional photos taken but we weren’t happy. Although the dyes have cool names like “fire red” and “hot purple”, the bottles are all the same shade of pink with just a small label to indicate the colour of the dye inside. When we put them on the site, at first glance the category pages looked like a whole load of the same product – and first glance is important.

We knew we needed to get the product colour across in a way that would be obvious at a glance from category page thumbnails and we didn’t want to rely on text (people don’t read text, we wish they would but they don’t). The manufacturers colour swatches weren’t very good and the client didn’t have the budget to get models and photographers so we had to improvise.

We started off by trying to emphasise the label on the bottle with a pop out; this kind of worked but it looked a bit flat so we added a zoomy shape. That looked worse.

Now although conventional wisdom says that you should always have a plain white background for all of your product pictures, we thought we’d dispense with conventional wisdom ’cause that’s just how we roll. The graphics on the bottle labels are actually quite strong so we tried pulling them in behind the bottles as a background image.  It took a few goes to get right, but some careful cutting, some gaussian blur and a few drop shadows later, voila.

Even at thumbnail size it’s obvious what colour you’re seeing, so these images work on category pages and they work on shopping feeds like googlebase too, particularly alongside the manufacturers stock images. You can see the Fire Red product image on the site here – Fire Red, have a look at the categories too.