When building and growing a business, customers need information. How marketers and advertisers provide their market with information will directly reflect their business performance. So, how can advertisers improve their product promotion? The quickest and easiest way is to focus on Graphic Design.
Graphic design is a crucial tool for marketers. In fact, studies show that over 94% of customers will leave a website with an unappealing graphic design. Customers will correlate the validity of a website to how it looks.
So, if you are a marketer and you want to take your graphic design strategy to a whole new level, here are the things you should know:
#1 Reel your audience in with a hook of a logo/title
50 milliseconds. A website only has 50 milliseconds to convince a viewer to stay. The first thing they’re going to see is the logo or the title of your project. If your readers stay, they have to know what’s waiting for them in-store, and you can capture your business or company’s identity with a well-designed logo. Just take a look at Coca-Cola, as over 90% of the global population can recognize their logo. That’s 6.57 billion people. See how far a good logo can go?
Some notes on creating a good logo are…
- Learning color psychology.
Picking the right colors for your logo will help set what your business is about in customers’ minds. For example, if you pick green, you are more likely to be associated with ecological and environmental agendas and themes. If you opt for white, it can help represent the simplicity and leanness of your product. Even a single color can be of great effect; take a look at Mcdonald’s golden arches, a simple M bathed entirely in yellow. Yet, it helps set in the mood of youth and energy that resonates both in children and adults alike.
- Mind the Font.
All fonts carry their personality, and thus certain fonts will suit different services and products better. If your business involves marketing, Sans Serif is sharp and looks professional. If you are catering to children, comic sans is easy to read, thick, and playful, which suits the developing minds of kids.
#2 What color suits you best
The impact of color is not exclusive to the logo of your business. It should also resonate when you create a website, infographics, or build your brand. When it comes to color, we may not even have a choice but to nail our use of it because consumers demand it, with over 92.6 saying that color is key in making a purchase. More so, you can establish a color to be integral to your business, improving brand recognition by over 80%, but you must choose the right shade and hue.
When branding a business, blue is the most popularly used, followed by green and then white. Blue seems to be the safest option, with consumers and designers believing it leads to business success and associates it with reliability. Red, on the other hand, is linked to speed and responsiveness. Whether these are merely lucky charms or a play at human psychology, we should know how to read colors and use them accordingly.
#3 Using original graphics
Around 68% of marketers and advertisers are projected to use graphic design for their businesses as we move into the future, and 34% of marketers who created original graphics claimed that it led them to commercial success. That’s a pretty good track record for graphic design, so if we wish to implement it in our businesses, we should avoid merely picking all the visuals, pictures, and symbols floating around on the net. Not only will this prevent copyright violations, but it will help build the identity of your business.
This tip can help out the overall quality of your design bec犀利士 ause if you create your own graphic to associate with your brand, you can help get your point across better. It will also allow you to move carefully with your market’s guidelines, standards, and expectations.
#4 Look better if you fit better
One of the more overlooked details in graphic designing is how your design fits the medium you want it on. Depending on where it is viewed, the layout of your design can change. Lines will break, words will scramble, and symbols can be scattered. So, decide if a phone, laptop, tablet, or even posters that your graphic will fit best. If you can, prepare for all.
#5 Don’t just go with the flow, create the flow
For any information to be received, it must first be rea犀利士 d. All of these other graphic design tips might be pointless if your readers can not properly comprehend what it is you’re trying to communicate with them.
You can utilize many different ways to help organize your data, such as charts, arrows, proper placement, or symbols and notations. You must view your customers as indifferent to what your business is about, so do your best to guide them on exactly what you want to be seen, how much of it you want to be seen, and how you want them to receive it.
#6 A singular source for images
Studies have shown that only 10% of what we hear and read are registered in our memory if it is not followed by some form of imagery. This is why we often find the urgent need for books to have pictures if we read one. It’s a human instinct to visualize. But, If you plan on using images for your graphic design, you best be mindful of how they all look side-by-side.
Complementing and consistent images will establish a theme for your design, establishing a whole story almost. Customer engagement will dramatically increase if you pull the right images, with 65% having said to remember advertisements and media with good visuals.
If you cannot hire a photographer that can take the photos that you need on your campaigns, you can find a reliable source of images online. Want to hit two birds in one stone? Find a graphic maker that has a repository of millions of royalty-free images. It will help you create stunning visuals, plus, you’ll never run out of images that you can tweak according to your brand.
#7 The universality of the rule of thirds.
If you’re a photographer, you’d know that the rule of thirds is the most basic technique to learn. It is a crucial concept to keep in mind when creating visuals in photography and design and helps capture customers’ attention.
To remember, take a design/visual, imagine a 3×3 grid over it, and remember to place subjects slightly to the left or right so that they are placed in different areas of the frame.
This helps to take away attention to a singular subject and helps create interest for the composition and background.
#8 Don’t be stale, do some scale
Resizing the data, pictures, and elements in your graphic can help do all kinds of wonders to its credibility. If you want to achieve minimalism, then scale a singular object and paste it on a blank background to create a sense of efficiency. If you’re going to overwhelm the customer, have an object overlap the dimensions of your frame. Think Godzilla in a movie poster, capture the sheer size of a giant monster well, and audiences will come running to the theatre to see how he destroys the next city near you.
Nevertheless, use scale in graphic design to designate a hierarchy of importance. A hierarchy of importance will help set what’s supposed to be focused on, making viewers aware of where to look to be more easily digestible. It can also create a simple story.
So, if you want to be creative and dazzle the audience, practice scaling and effectively apply it to your designs.
#9 Keep things organized with alignment.
If scaling had to do with size, alignment has to do with the arrangement. This one is pretty simple, as simple as arranging everything on your desk. With that, it can be very overlooked.
Just as in the real world, alignment plays a big part in doing things. Think about how precise every label on a map is. If things were just jumbled in randomly, how would we get anywhere?
The same must go for graphic design. Viewers must have a sense of direction on what they are looking at. With alignment, keep it simple. Make sure the viewer does get themselves distracted with useless elements. Keep lines straight. Be sure always to keep it tight and tell the viewers that you care about how they view your product/design.
#10 Balance
We are done with size, over with arrangement. Now we move unto distribution.
As with most things in life, too much or too little is not a good sign, and keeping the elements inside your graphic design away from both extremes is crucial to how people will receive the graphic.
Balance is an aspect of design that focuses on the visual weight of your elements and how they look together horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even with the foreground or background. Not maintaining a sense of balance in your design will have elements unnoticed and leave viewers astray and missing the point.
Some things to keep in mind to achieve balance is…
- Color (Hues, values, color palette)
- Text against imagery ( not have too much text against a single image or have images outweigh the value of your text)
- Texture (No clashing of roughness and softness that to pointless effect)
#11 Audience
Look, all these graphic design tips don’t matter if we don’t get them to the right audience or market. People have cravings, have preferences, and have aesthetics that are such a crucial part of their critical thinking that we must factor it in when creating a visual that we intend to catch their attention.
Selling toys for children under nine years old? Create a vibrant, festive graphic that radiates childhood excitement. Trying to cater to hungry fast food fanatics? Turn up the saturation on your burger to make it extra appetizing.
There are many ways to capture an audience, be sure to study them, know what they want, and focus on reaching their sights.
#12 Revision
A rule of thumb of graphic design, or really anything that involves creativity, is to have one last look at it before you finalize and revise, revise, revise, or anything that may destroy the final output.
There may be an off-color, a misspelling, a square a little bit bigger than that other square, or maybe you realize that it wasn’t what you were going for. These small little things can greatly affect your design’s overall reception, so do not underestimate them and clear them out before deciding on anything.
A lot of graphic design tips, don’t be careless!
When it comes to design, there is so much that can go wrong that you can’t excuse yourself from getting a few things right. Always remember we are part of a society that values our sense of sight more than anything else, so get ahead of the competition by taking advantage of something so natural and so intuitive of us humans. It’s a cheat code. Abuse it.