Brand · Photography & Imagery

Documentary, not stock.

Real factory floors and real hardware, graded to the same warm palette as the rest of the system.

No real photography asset ships with this system yet — ProductImage falls back to a plain model-number label until real shots exist (see Components). The swatches below describe the correct treatment using graded placeholders and written framing rules, so a photographer or a stock search has something concrete to match — not a fabricated photo standing in as if it were real.

Color grade

Warm-neutral, matching the site's own sand/ink hue family — never the cool teal-and-orange or blue-gray grade generic tech marketing defaults to.

Do Warm grade — amber highlight, palm-ink shadow

Correct: highlights lean sand/amber, shadows sit in a deep warm green-black — the same undertone as --ink and --sand. Reads as one palette with the rest of the brand.

Don't Cool grade — teal shadow, blue highlight

Incorrect: a cool teal/blue grade (or a flat blue-gray corporate look) fights the warm palette everywhere else on the site and reads as generic stock photography.

Contrast & grain

Moderate-to-high contrast, documentary rather than flat and washed out — shadows stay deep, detail stays readable in the highlights (a PCB's solder points, a control panel's dials). Never a black-and-white treatment, anywhere. When a photo sits inside a dark/atmospheric section, it can carry the same 7%-opacity film-grain overlay (.grain-texture, mix-blend-mode: overlay) already used on hero and footer sections, so the photo and the surrounding UI feel like one continuous surface rather than a pasted-in image.

Duotone & overlay

Photography stays photographic. Duotone color-mapping and decorative gradient washes belong to the illustration system, not to photography.

Do Flat ink scrim, for text legibility only

Correct: a single flat --ink scrim fading up from the bottom, used only where hero text needs to sit legibly over a photo — functional, not decorative.

Don't Green/gold duotone map over the photo

Incorrect: mapping the photo's tones into brand green/gold turns it into a graphic treatment — that's what the gold line-art schematics are for. A photo duotoned this way stops looking real.

Framing

In-context and documentary, always. Never a posed studio stock shot.

Do — An engineer's hands adjusting a PCB under a bench light in a Dammam workshop, shot slightly from above; a wide shot of an actual factory floor with real equipment and cabling in frame; a control panel mid-installation. Subjects mid-task, never looking at the camera.

Don't — A model in a lab coat smiling directly at the camera in a sterile white studio; generic "person pointing at a tablet full of floating icons" stock imagery; any staged set that isn't a real jobsite or workshop.