This image fails. Can it be better?
An image should immediately energize interest, maintaining crisp visual contact, cued to content.
Why doesn’t this image work?
- Blurry
- Busy–assaults the senses
- Colors clash
- Meaning is not immediately clear
- Inacurrate or overextended confluence of symbols, i.e. Caduceus (not medical), the Rod of Asclepius (medical), scales of justice and a courthouse.1
- The sky and lawn introduce jarring color shift from the subject and introduce a new, unrelated subject (is it important to know what is outdoors, what has a manicured lawn?)
- The image takes too much time to figure out
Why We Use Visual Elements
After you read this section, take note of your visual experience.
65% of the population are visual learners (research 2011, 2004)2 That includes attorneys and juries and, perhaps, you. This population struggles with text-only content. 100% of the population suffers from eye fatigue when reading on the backlit monitor, tablet or phone, including the non-visual learners.
1. Eye fatigue is lessened if text includes a place for the eye to “rest,” in order to absorb the meaning of the text.3 This is accomplished by visuals and negative space (the amount of unfilled backdrop surrounding the text.) In other words, use graphics, but use “empty” space too. The goal is a visually comfortable user experience.
In the vernacular, “TLDR” (“Too long, don’t read”) is tough in a business where you use a lot of words. Writing training ground for doctors is academic. 100% of academic text is visually compact, taking up most of the page.
Increasing User Interaction
“Interaction” means
- Spending enough time on the web page to read the entire text.
- Clicking on a phone number or email.
- Navigating the site for more to read.
- Looking at an About page, because the writer has left an impression.
Neuroscience and “Meaning Making”
We parse visual information to conceptualize meaning. Images create cognitive anchors.
This is supported by research about eye movement, gaze pathing and “meaning-making.” Eyetracking research shows people traverse American language content in predictable patterns. For example, text is read in an F Pattern (left to right, down, left to right) but text with images in columns can, depending on layout, follow a :ZigZag” pattern. There are dozens of books, journal articles and research on this topic. Suffice to say, we don’t read a website the way we read a book.
Website content that acknowledges what we know about reader behavior will be more effective:
Reading>comprehension>retention>interest>reaching out to the writer (you)>case calls for the expert witness.
The perspective of the reader and their comprehension and retention of content should drive design choices. Your personal style and taste in design is not relevant to your website’s graphical look.
Getting to the point is harder than it looks. Visuals do some of the heavy lifting.
SEO
Before an attorney reads your site, they must find your site. Search Engine Optimization used to be focused on “keywords.” The key is “words.” Google’s “Generative AI” and “AI Search” has changed that landscape. It now prioritizes material on websites and articles to tell it if the site will help answer the user’s query or search intent.
It does so by sifting through data points that include images. The algorithm incorporates an image’s data point called “alt text.” Alt text is human-generated descriptive terms embedded in the site’s back-end. Alt text that supports the writing’s meaning will more accurately and more quickly be incorporated into the AI’s ability to rank your content.
It takes time, patience, and thought to break up concepts into a logical and illustrated narrative.
For the best results, collaborate with a person who deeply understands what you have written and is at ease forming graphics/photos so support your meaning.
This would include a website designer and/or content creator in a field adjacent to your own, along with the back-end developer (CSS, responsive design.) A website developer who cannot interpret the meaning of forensic topics, can make a mistake-pairing the text with irrelevant or confusing elements.
Finding Images
Stock Imagery
“Stock Photos” and illustrations are available as downloads from services like Adobe Stock Images which has over 250 million images, graphics, illustrations and videos. Shutterstock and iStock have equally large collections.
Price
Access is via an annual commitment paid monthly for a subscription fee. Adobe and iStock are $29 and Shutterstock is $19. You receive 120 images a year, rolled out each month. Getty stock is $400/month, geared to large marketing budgets.
Take advantage of free trials. During the trial period, images you download provide the same licensing protections as if you had signed up for the whole year. It’s a good time to find a header for your LinkedIn profile and grab a graphic or two to punch up your content. Don’t forget to cancel, or upgrade to a paid subscription, before the trial period ends.
Licensing to Use Copyrighted Image
The subscription fee provides you with copyright and licensing protections as well the right to change graphics to suit your use.
Clients have come to me with images they pulled off the internet, without permission, and used on an existing website or to illustrate an article.
It is illegal.
Case Study. A psychiatrist and expert witness wrote an article about fitness for duty evaluations, and mental illness in people in high risk occupations. A recent case in the news involved a pilot who was suicidal and attempted to crash a passenger plane. The doctor found a generic photo of an emotionally distressed pilot online and asked to include it in his article. It turned out that a news outlet owned the copyright and sent demand letters for compensation for months, even though the image was removed immediately. The image was in no way worth the effort.
Stock photos and graphics are the solution.
How to Choose an Image that Describes What you Do: for the Eye
There is not a lot of variety among images that immediately say “Medical” and/or “Law.” An attorney can look at only so many images of an intertwined stethoscope and gavel….so let’s get creative.
Solutions in Choice and Execution
Dodging a cliche is easier than you might think.
Photos. For example, a stock image can be adapted in Adobe Photoshop to take on a different color, cast, crop, landscape/portrait orientation and more. Another tool is to pair images.
Videos are included in stock databases and can be powerful tools when motion reinforces a concept.
Case study. I purchased a video for a client’s site: a rotating head and the gears inside. Using video editing software, I slowed down the speed and direction of the rotation and its orientation to the screen to emphasize 3 dimensionality. I compressed the file size to keep it from slowing the page’s loading time.
These revisions are within the parameters of the license.
The result had an excellent impact on SEO and the time a user spent on the site reading the hefty content. This led to attorneys calling the expert and retaining him for cases.
Overuse
After critiquing dozens of websites, here are a few graphics I have red flagged for overuse. Some have added problems with legibility on mobile.
If you have these on your site, consider alternatives including stepping aside from a medical/legal metaphor altogether and focus on your own professional strengths.
Least Favorite Top 5:
Gavel
Photo Version
Stethoscope
Same! Photo Version
Courthouse
Photo Version
Blind Lady Justice
Photo Version
Scales of Justice
Photo Version
Caduceus
Photo Version Two-Fer
Is there a place for any of these?
Courthouse and columns. These are popular with expert witnesses. Many tell me they believe it ties their services to the law and that attorneys appreciate the association. Aesthetically, columns embrace a pattern of vertical repetition which is simple and easy to read. In photos, a neutral color scheme could be interpreted as more conservative (e.g. granite, marble, stone.)
The problem is that so many expert witnesses use this image on their websites that it has become predictable and loses the power of being unexpected.
Make the columns relevant.
If you must use a courthouse image, consider a specific courthouse in your geographic area, or designs that are referential but not literally a courthouse. It can also have words carved on it that speak to you.
Skylines
Website headers are often the skyline of a city. But attorneys may not care where you are, or recognize a particular skyline. That visual real estate is the first and largest anyone sees when they land on your home page. It must serve your practice.
Use a skyline when one of the most important thing about your practice is your location.
What I Found on Google
I did an image search on Google. Here are the images, among millions that come up under the search term “Expert Witness Physician.” They don’t wow me. Some are far too familiar.
What do you think?
This is possibly the most common image on the internet.
Does this photo "speak" to forensic medicine? Look online. You'll see it on plenty of sites.
What's your top priority to communicate? Geography or Expertise.
Or?
This image captures my imagination. How would you use it?
Imagine titles of articles with this image.
The stock image was everything but the words. For a client's site I added words specifically to convey forensic unravelling of a complex situation leading to a competency evaluation.
I have one client who would love this 'psychadelic' and others who would hate it.
The message is clearly investigation and assessment. On a bold, minimalist site this might be perfect.
I needed an image of an expert witness on the stand and no one stock photo was "just right." My workaround was to license 2 stock images and overlay them with a blur effect to create movement.
Footnotes:
1. In this image, an iconology error is reflected by Caduceus, the symbol of Hermes’ rod and Mercury’s wings intertwined with snakes and the Rod of Asclepius.
Although the Rod of Asclepius, which has only one snake and no wings, is the traditional and more widely used symbol of medicine, the caduceus is sometimes used by healthcare organizations. Given that the caduceus is primarily a symbol of commerce and other non-medical symbology, many healthcare professionals disapprove of this use.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
2. “visual cues also act as cognitive anchors, aiding information retention.” Pjesivac, Ivanka & Wojdynski, Bartosz & Geidner, Nicholas. (2021). Television Infographics as Orienting Response: An Eye-Tracking Study of the Role of Visuospatial Attention in Processing of Television News. Electronic News. 15. 193124312110395. 10.1177/19312431211039500.
Of additional interest about teaching law to women students, the ABA recommended changes in first year learning curriculum which was not adopted.
“…variations in learning styles have been linked to gender: women tend to be more visually oriented than men, who are generally more kinesthetic, and consequently female students are systematically more prone to suffer the deleterious effects of learning style-teaching method mismatch than men. However, sixteen years after the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession suggested to law schools that the first-year curriculum would be improved by the use of greater variety of teaching methods in light of the diversity of learning styles in the student body, the typical first-year doctrinal course remains a predominantly verbal domain. In some degree this is a function of the subject matter. After all, law is a bibliocentric profession, and words are the coin of the realm. But we need not seek the radical transformation of the law to teach to the entire class. ” [Em. added] Bradford, William C., Reaching the Visual Learner: Teaching Property Through Art (September 1, 2011). The Law Teacher Vol. 11, 2004, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=587201
3. “Multimodality emphasizes situated action – that is, the importance of the social context and the resources available for meaning making, with attention to people’s situated choice of resources” Jewitt, C. (2013). Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies. In S. Price, C. Jewitt, B. Brown (Eds.) Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies (pp. 250-265). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446282229.n18https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293275174_Multimodal_methods_for_researching_digital_technologies [Emphasis added]
Check out the companion article DIY Websites for Med-Legal Experts in 2025.
Practice Development for Expert Witnesses
Beryl Vaughan, Consultant
