With more businesses moving their teams completely remote after COVID-19, maintaining a unified team presence is becoming increasingly difficult for companies and organizations.

If company-wide professional headshots were never taken for your team, all you have would be a handful of photos of faces that were taken at different times with various lighting, cameras, positions, styles, and resolutions. Put them side by side in a presentation, proposal or on your brand new website and they will look like they are freshly pulled out of Google. This could have a negative influence on your company credibility.

While it is more expensive and time-consuming to hire photographers in each location and get on the same page regarding the style, companies have an opportunity to think creatively about how to tackle this issue.

Here at Four Fin, we have come up with some creative solutions that help our clients present their complete remote team with a look of professionalism and coherence.

Black and White headshots, with branded color roll over

Seismic is a PR firm with team members spread across the US. As they prepared to launch their new website with a shiny new brand, team headshots needed to be freshened as well. We helped Seismic put together a photoshoot at their post-Covid, in-person team-wide retreat. This gave the majority of the team a unified look. However, not everyone could attend the event, so we also accounted for future additions, by shooting them on a clean white background.

Benefits of this approach: 

• Even with headshots in different positions, cropping, and sizes, the team still looks coherent as a whole.
• When new team members need to be added, it’s quick and easy to turn any headshot into black and white and give it a clean background.
• Easily works with any brand colors. To add interest and enhance the brand impression, we added Seismic’s gradient color to the roll over state of the headshots, which also helps users to know that it’s a clickable page.

Use a graphic treatment to unify

Benhamou Global Ventures is a remote team spread across the globe through different time zones. The leadership team, who needed to be showcased on the website, faced the challenge of not having the capacity or time to take a new headshot.

 If you find yourself in a similar circumstance, a nice way to still achieve a coherent team look is to enhance the graphic treatment for the photos. However, this method does require more production work.

Benefits of this approach: 

• Using clipping paths to cut out backgrounds reduces the differences
• Added graphic element (here we used a circle) in the grid system helped unify the overall look and feel
• Easy to add new faces

That’s a wrap

If the solutions we mentioned above don’t solve for your specific case, there are some additional options to try:

Team-wide retreat/photoshoot

Like we mentioned above for the Seismic team, any physical team building event is a great opportunity to gather everyone’s headshot. Pick a place you enjoy, and make an appointment with a great local photographer, communicate the style and you’re good to go.

Put together a headshot style guide

A style guide provides tips and guidelines for headshots that help both team members and photographers achieve a consistent look. By defining width and height, resolution, clothes to wear, backgrounds, lighting, postures, etc, you can easily yield workable results.

Use virtual headshots services like Heroic Headshots

If all you are looking to do is improve the headshots you’ve collected from the team, and there’s not much time or resources to be creative, consider using a paid service like Heroic Headshots, that automatically generates the headshots to align with your brand, in a few easy steps.

We hope this gets you started on creating consistent team headshots. Nowadays with smartphones, we can easily take high-res photos that are good enough for any digital presentation. With the right creative strategies, you’ll find it easy to improve the quality and unity of your team shots, and leave a great first digital impression of your team.

Still need help? Reach out!