Business graphic design has always been an important part of a successful operation, but that importance has spiked immeasurable as the internet and technologies have improved over the years.
In a cluttered and competitive digital world, cutting through the noise with quality graphic design helps you to become a notably player in your industry. And in a world where it’s hard to get your target audience’s attention, good graphic design can make all the difference.
In years gone by, graphic design was required for brand image and brand identity, as well as business assets like business cards and letterheads. Today, it is required to populate digital channels including websites, social media channels and applications across any internet-connected device.
When you consider that there are around 3.5 billion searches every single day on Google, and 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, it is obvious how much competition every business faces. Getting brand recognition is a huge challenge, and high-quality, good graphic design can help you to reach your audience. So why should you invest in graphic designers for your brand image and website design?
Help your business stand out with graphic design
It It is important for your business to make good first impressions
The internet, social media and technology mean your business has the shortest window to make a first impression than ever before. Some studies have shown that you have just 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression with your digital and graphic design on your website and social media. That’s basically instant; people are going to form their own opinions on your brand from a flashing glance while scrolling through feeds or searching for competitors online.
Your business and company websites – product design – need to be appealing, memorable and instantly send a message to make that first impression count. Poor graphic design is going to put you on the back foot right from the get-go.
Graphic design makes your business look professional
You could be the largest company in the world in your field or industry with the best quality products or services and it won’t matter at all if you are using marketing materials that don’t have professional; graphic design involved. Poor design is enough to make any brand image or product look unprofessional and immediately put potential customers off your company altogether. It’s time for business owners to understand how marketing efforts and professional graphic design go hand in hand, ultimately having a direct effect on the bottom line.
Your design work is such a critical part of how you reach your customers and is present on digital elements like your company websites and social media. It’s even a part of your traditional assets – like business cards, logo design, product concepts and even for training material targeting staff members.
Having consistency in your design makes your brand more credible
The subconscious messaging is extremely simple. If your branding is consistent, then your products and services are going as well. There is a direct correlation between consistent designed graphic, branding and logo material, and how consumers perceive your brand. Are they able to trust that they will receive the same level of service and delivery?
Think about the golden arches of McDonald’s. You know that you are going to get the same product and the same service, no matter where you in the world. This is consistency in their brand recognition, company messaging and in their business environment. It’s instantly recognised across the globe.
It allows you to present data in user-friendly ways
Data is key in the modern world and how your business uses customer data effectively is going to go a long way towards your success or failure.
Presenting this kind of information to customers can be a challenge and throwing our raw numbers and stats can be confusing. Remember, not everyone is a mathematician or data scientist. Quality graphic design matters here because it lets you translate this complex information into a readable, attractive format. For a purpose that relies on your target audience engaging with specific material, this is crucial.
Graphic design helps your business organise and silo information
A graphic designer isn’t just about creating your customer-facing assets — their job is also to help with your company collateral, training material, internal assets and any source of business information.
It also means that you can present data internally with greater effect, as the former point on presenting data to customers. Annual reports, customer behaviour data, industry trends and much more can be presented to staff in a highly effective way which can be used to generate more engaging marketing campaigns, better ways of conducting business and more dependable ways of reaching and engaging with your target audience. The thing about well-designed graphics is that it needs a professional on it all the time, and having this resource in your team means your design can help lift your company image on all fronts.
Quality designed graphics help you tell your story
Your website, logo and social media presence give you the opportunity to tell the tale of your brand and apply a real personality to it all. Whether it’s in your logo or the branding in your email address signature (or maybe even motion graphics), all of this plays a part. Graphic designers ensure all of these elements remain consistent; all design needs attention-to-detail, and this is a core aspect of their job.
The secret to successful storytelling lies in the designs and presentation. Quality designs will tie your brand, message and images together. In turn, this will improve how your business is perceived on the market, and create more impact on your company website.
Find your message and ensure it is prominent in all of your design (including on your website and in your logo). Your customers should know exactly what your brand stands for and what kind of personality it carries. This means they will go from casual consumers to an engaged follower that is more likely to be a loyal customer and recommend your brand to others.
The first step towards achieving this is to identify your story and your brand name message by creating a mission statement that takes in your products and services, the target audience you want to reach.
These are the building blocks for a successful brand story and graphic design vision and will allow you to create quality designs that encompass all of these elements and dominate competition. You can then take this content to market, attracting more clients and developing quality relationships through your improved design elements.
It helps engender trust
A study showed that a whopping 94 per cent of the things that consumers look for in a brand on first impressions are graphic design services-related. Most of the issues that the businesses raised were centred around graphic design including complex and busy websites or the other end of the spectrum where they were too boring. High volumes of text and a lack of navigation aids were also identified along with the wrong use of colours and websites feeling too “corporate”.
When people feel this way about your website or products, they feel that way about your brand and they are going to ignore you at best, mistrust you at worst. By having a quality design that is compelling, engaging, simple to understand and user-friendly you are going to immediately earn trust from potential clients who are visiting your site for the first time. This is where you can turn the connection into a quality relationship. Then, and only then, will they invest in your service or product.
Colours matter
There are two things to consider when your graphic designer is selecting colours for images, website design or graphics. Firstly, on a technical level, you have to understand how these colours play a purpose, and how they will appear on different devices. How will they look in the environment where your assets will be physical? Then there is the psychological impact your colours are going to have on your potential clients, and this is something your graphic designer will need to consider when creating any content, images. logo material or concepts for your website blog posts.
Colours and emotions are closely linked to each other and a good graphic designer will be able to link the right colours and hues to your brand to invoke the right emotions with your audience. This will improve the relatability. This can be challenging as colours can invoke different emotions (in some case the opposite) depending on the context. For example, warm colours like yellows, oranges and reds can be linked to happiness but they can also be an alert colour that is designed to attract attention and make your audience take action.
The hue of colours is important as well. Think blue and green, these colours are linked to nature and have a calming effect. But when you start to dull these colours, especially blue, all of a sudden these colours can be linked to sadness. The opposite is true when you start to energise colours and make them neon. You can make blue or green big and happy and exciting by dialling up the tone.
Having a strong understanding of colours, their meanings and the emotions they invoke will go a long way towards sending the right message and establishing the right connection with your audience and potential clients within markets that are competitive.
Quality design makes businesses and content more memorable
You only have to use the biggest examples to understand how good designs can make your branding instantly recognisable to a large audience. The Nike Swoosh, for example, has no words whatsoever but you would struggle to find anyone in the world that wouldn’t know which company that brand belongs to and what it means. This is just one example of how good design can make your brand instantly memorable through graphic designs that consider all aspects of consumer psychology.
There are other examples of logos that have no text whatsoever, like the Olympic rings, that are instantly recognisable the world over. There are some businesses that you can recognise just by colours, like when you see farm machinery that is painted in green and yellow you are highly likely to recognise that the brand is John Deere. Then there is the use of simple symbols, with the classic Apple logo with the bite taken out of one of the most recognisable businesses in the world.
You don’t need to be a super large corporation to become this memorable. Through the right graphic design methods and consistency in marketing you can make your brand memorable in the market you want as well. All it takes is investing in graphic designers that will improve this aspect of your business.
Design isn’t just about how it looks; it is about how it works
We have spent a lot of time on the aesthetics of business graphic design and how it is important for your business, but there is more to design than just the visual appeal of your company. Apple founder Steve Jobs famously said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” and this applies to all design when it comes to your business branding.
A quality business graphic designer will adopt this mentality. This will be thinking about what information your design needs to be portrayed, who the target audience is, what you want to inspire them to think, feel and do etc.
The role of a designer
Being a graphic designer isn’t just about creating pretty logos and the right choice of colours. A designer should be committed to communicating messages to any audience. A designer has a role to provide value. Their duty is about inspiring people to act. Graphic designs are completely functional elements in their own right.
Get in touch with our digital marketing Gold Coast team to discuss how our graphic design department can revolutionise your brand.
