Ingrid Bray
Corporate Communications and Brand Manager
We use photography for marketing and website design purposes to help engage our audience in an unobtrusive way. We use two types of photography, reportage and portrait.
It is important to retain our tone of voice in text, content and narration throughout video production. It will help the content that we produce stay recognisable as distinctly BMJ. These guidelines here apply to product user guides and promotional videos.
Contact the multimedia team for support or branded artwork.
If you have any questions, or any of these guidelines are unclear, please email brandteam@bmj.com
Reportage photography | portrait photography | cropping and removing visual clutter | video | lower thirds | transitions | partner logos | buffer images and thumbnails | compression
We use reportage photography for marketing and website design purposes to help engage our audience in an unobtrusive way.
Reportage photography is also known as documentary photography for the way in which it captures a moment or event in a narrative fashion. We use this style of imagery to tell a story, and demonstrate that we understand the way our audiences work and their daily challenges.
This photography should always feel natural, representing observations from the working life of the subject. It should never be staged and as a general rule the subject should not look into the camera.
Our imagery should always be relevant to the audience and their geographic position in the world. Always ensure that the images don’t include any identifiers such as name badges or patient and clinical data. Hair should be tied back and no nail varnish or jewellery can be on show.
Location
Lighting
Image format
We use portrait photography to reflect specific audiences such as doctors, managers and nurses. We also use them for internal communications purposes to reflect our brand values.
For internal or external purposes, all our portraits should capture the personality of the subject without jeopardising their professionalism. To help this we often ask them to look into the camera although this is not a fixed requirement.
To ensure the focus is on the individual we always make sure the background is blurred but clean and doesn’t cause any distraction from the main subject. We avoid taking photos against a white wall or foliage.
Subjects should choose to wear deep, dark or muted colours.
Intro and outro
Use the BMJ or BMJ product name logo animation at the beginning and/or end of your video. Remember to always include a call to action at the end.
Title and credit slides
Help the audience to view the main message quickly by adding the title to the name logo intro slide. Likewise, use the outro to add a URL or brief credit – always with a call to action.
Titles should subtly fade in and fade out in our standard title font: Interface in sentence case; capitalising only the first word and any proper nouns. Text should be clearly legible sitting on the left in white, BMJ blue or BMJ grey beneath the logo.
Lower thirds should be in sentence case in either Interface or Interface Bold.
Text should be centred in no more than two small coloured bars that float in the lower left or lower right corner of the video. Bar and font colours should be selected from our colour palette and complement the tone of the video. Bars should briefly fade in and fade out. We strongly discourage any further lower thirds animation.
Incorporate the use of subtitles using YouTube programme to aid SEO and to support accessibility at conferences and on social media.
Use cut -aways rather than transition – and use transitions sparingly. Overall, try to use a mixture to make it look interesting.
The preference is a zoom-cut. Text slide transitions should be on a BMJ blue #2A6EBB background using Interface regular font in white sentence case.
This is under discussion so come back soon!
Custom artwork or screen grabs can be used for image overlays as buffer slides and thumbnails. When creating custom images, please apply the overall BMJ brand guidelines and also consider the following guidance:
Use person mid-flow with a flattering angle, to be the most engaging.
Use cystin thumbnails
Use images that look great at small and large sizes. Images should accurately represent the content at 1280×720 resolution (minimum width – 640 pixels), 16:9 aspect ratio in JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG files and 2mb max file size.
The amount of compression applied to your final output file should be kept an acceptable level. This is to ensure that the output image is without colour shifts or compression artefacts, and that audio is clear. Ideally there should be no visible degradation.
Minimum video resolution for 16:9 projects is 1280×720. Minimum bitrate 5 Mbps. Recommended video resolution for 16:9 projects is 1920×1080. Minimum bitrate 10 Mbps.
Deliver drafts in Vimeo and final videos in a high quality format; one that is not a compressed mov. file.
