In December of 2018, Ramsey Solutions made the decision to no longer use stock photos in any of our creative. Let’s be honest—stock photos are kind of the worst. Even the best feel posed and fake. Ramsey prides itself on being warm, real, and bold and every terrible stock photo was holding us back. As a company with strong opinions on debt, it was also crushing to see a photo we had used also being used in a credit card ad by a competitor. So we decided once and for all: no more stock photos.

The main culprit of stock photo over usage was our blog, specifically in the header image for each article. Plus, we had thousands of articles so it was going to be difficult to suddenly change our process going forward and update all previous images.

To solve the problem our team created the new global style for photos at Ramsey, along with guardrails and examples. We encouraged our team of designers to go out and take their own authentic images—to use real people and real life moments. We encouraged them to be scrappy, to lean on each other, and to come up with creative solutions. As a team we swarmed our old blog header images and worked over the course of a couple months to replace our highest performing blogs’ header images.

Now the blog has a consistent style across all articles that is unique and 100% Ramsey brand.