Image Guidelines

Images can help make a website more engaging, but they can also be a distraction. Poor quality images detract from the trustworthiness of Iowa.gov. Use high quality images on your site, and choose photography reflective of Iowa constituents and communities. 

Navigate to our video guide for further visual guidance on how to add images to the media library.

Best practices

  • Alt Text Accessibility. All images require descriptive alternative text. Alt text is read by screen readers or displayed on the screen when an image is not available.  Images of text are not accessible. Use plain text instead. Data, Tables and charts should have full text explanations of their content by using the caption field. Never use images that scroll, blink, or flash.  Decorative images alt text should be "" (double quotation marks) to allow the screen reader to skip over the image, you can also use the word decorative for images that do not add any additional relevant information.  Learn more about writing good alternate text descriptions and what the law requires in this ServiceNow Knowledge Article on Accessible Images and Alternate Text
  • Optimize. Image files must be less than 100 MB. Follow image size guidelines. Large images increase page load time and may negatively impact the user experience on your site.
  • File types. The media library image uploader accepts a number of different file types and url embeds like png, jpg, jpeg just to name a few. 
  • Prioritize text. The text content of your page is your first priority. Images are supplemental. Content must make sense and be usable without the image.

Common Image Sizes

Hero images should be no smaller than 1440 pixels wide. Ideally, to scale for retina displays, your images should be at least 2880 pixels wide. 

Other images should be no smaller than 528 pixels wide.

You can upload images up to 100MB.

The system scales images appropriately for the device that people use when they visit your site. It may also crop images that are not the correct aspect ratio or dimension.

Images look better scaled down than scaled up. Size your images appropriately before you upload them.

Image Ratio

Most images on the site are in a 4:3 ratio, or landscape orientation. That means for every four pixels of width there should be three pixels of height.

To calculate the image ratio: 

  • Take the height of your image and multiply it by 4/3 to compute the width; or
  • Take the width of your image and multiply it by 3/4 to compute the height.

Images used as the feature on basic pages, promos, and visual link collections follow the 4:3 ratio.

Image of 4 to 3 ratio

Image Styles

  • Do. Use clear, natural looking photos. Images should feature a person, place, or thing that is relevant to your content.
  • Don’t. Don’t use heavily edited images, or images with overlays or other filters. Avoid clip art and logos in featured image fields.
Sorting bottles for recycling

An example of a good image to use on Iowa.gov. It's clear, with no text overlay, and relevant to the subject matter of the page.

Media Library

To access the media library, log into the CMS, then navigate to Content β†’ Media β†’ Media library. Use the + Add media button at the top of the page to open the Add media workflow.

  • Upload. You can upload one file at a time. 
  • Edit. You can edit an image or file by clicking the edit button within the media library. Best practiecs is to use this edit button if you need to update the file with a new file revision instead of uploading a whole separate media item.  Any edits you make here will be applied to all instances of that image, throughout the website. 
  • Alternative text. All images must have alt text. You can’t save a media item until you add alt text. 
  • Focal point. To adjust the focal point of an image, edit the image in the media library. Move the cross icon on the image to the desired focal point. This is most useful on headshots for person profiles.
  • Delete. Removing an image from a component on a page will not delete that image from the media library. Delete the image from within the media library to permanently delete it from the system.

Learn more about how to add media items to your media library

Stock Photography

All major Iowa Cabinet level agencies will have direct access to Shutterstock. Smaller agencies can access Shutterstock via DOM DoIT.

Resources