Graphic Design
Almost everything made today requires graphic design, from traffic signs to marketing. If you are looking at it, a graphic designer likely had a hand in making sure that it is properly formatted to catch your attention and legibly display a message in a memorable manner. While all the items that utilize graphic design might feel unrelated, the same underlying set of rules known as design psychology apply, aiding in the function of the piece, whether it be to let drivers know about a change in traffic or to convince potential customers to purchase a product.
Design is important because it is what people see before they can read the written content. It aids in the viewer’s ability to read the content itself, but more importantly, it creates an emotional connection, imprinting how a person perceives the business. In addition to reinforcing and providing context for information, good design can actually make understanding and digesting the written content easier.
The difference between art and commercial art
It is not sufficient to simply rely on artistic sense when creating pieces for commercial purposes. Generally, art allows any viewer the freedom to feel anything, but in contrast, commercial art encourages a specific viewer to feel something purposefully. Instead of using art principles alone, designers must utilize the knowledge formed by the study of design psychology and the spectrum of different effects on a myriad of demographics. Additionally, commercial art must work in hand with a number of other marketing principles such as Hick’s Law to deal with short attention spans, or the Pareto Principle, which in marketing has mostly to do with target audience inclinations. With these expanded considerations and a combination of information hierarchy and an understanding of the viewers’ eye movements, layout and graphic treatments can help people parse available information into consumable sections, guiding the eye to the most critical information first, digesting displayed content in a purposeful order
Each microculture perceives design differently. For example, black is a mourning color in Europe and America, while white is worn for funerals in many parts of Asia. Every section of the population – age group, race, gender, socio-economic niche – will react uniquely to colors, fonts, line qualities, and word choice. Before beginning any design process, who will see it, what needs to be read, and where it will be seen should be set in stone so that designers can apply the knowledge of these different responses to each and every design.
There is a purely technical side of design that is required to ensure not only basic functionality such as the legibility of text and correct appearance of colors, but also correct file preparation for display or specific printing processes.Understanding these details are part of what makes a designer more than an artist.
Logo Design & Dynamic Logos
While there is more to branding than a logo, it’s importance should not be diminished. The primary role of a logo is to represent the core qualities of the business in a way that speaks to the target audience, while remaining unique and memorable. Advertising is so prevalent in our society that the average person sees over 5,000 ads per day, making it paramount that a logo can be understood in what research shows to be less than one second in order for it to be remembered. The use of logos is increasing constantly with the variety of mediums for display diversifying as well. Today, different contexts require that designers create slight variants for logo display that allow for imagery to appear at its best when size, background, medium, and color options differ from situation to situation.
What can be expected from a logo?
Everything has a logo now, from corporations to sole proprietors. This trend has actually increased the demands each logo must meet, which is only compounded by today’s shortened attention spans. No answer is universal: simple logos are easy to read, but hard to make unique while complex logos can be beautiful and bespoke, but are often hard to understand at a glance.
A logo must be the perfect distillate of a business, with every color and shape considering the target audience. It must be legible at every size and accommodate those with vision impairments or colorblindness. It must be flexible enough to grow with a company and remain relevant. It must be many things, all while being aesthetically pleasing and completely unique.
Branding: More than just a logo
Colors, shapes, images, and fonts create an observable reaction in the brain, based upon cultural information that is cemented in childhood. Design psychology is the academic field that seeks to understand these responses. This field has a surprisingly long history, with certified psychologists specializing in the field as early as 1903. Designers utilize this knowledge to create branding that will intrinsically relate the values and identity of a business to the viewer. Branding packs and style guides help businesses enforce these concepts by codifying the colors, fonts, textures, and other imagery to be used consistently in all advertising materials. This guarantees that every design is not only cohesive, but because of the application of design psychology, materials created can effectively influence targeted audiences in predictable ways.
Branding
Branding is an industry term that includes the logomark, fonts, colors, textures, and guidelines for how these elements may be combined to create marketing assets. A style guide is the set of rules that a company uses to ensure that every facet of a business’ marketing assets appear consistently with the public, defining what the branding is for a specific company. Creating and following these rules helps the public recognize a business across different mediums and locations; this effect is called “brand recognition”. Building brand recognition makes every marketing tool potentiate the next.
Branding is often created before a business opens to the public, but it can also be retroactively applied to existing businesses that only have logos, or who are looking to update both the branding and logo without losing the recognition that has already been built.
What you may not know about small business options
Most small businesses are forced to hire a variety of designers, developers, and other freelancers to create assets as needed, never having a managing professional to coordinate aesthetics and goals from piece to piece or creating a cohesive marketing plan to serve a business’ goals. Due to the number of specialties required to create professional marketing tools, even companies that have in house marketers struggle because most of what is necessary is beyond the training of the few individuals that small businesses can afford to hire.
The use of both freelancers and in-house marketers can lead to fractured, inconsistent designs that make it harder for the public to connect marketing tools to the business it belongs to. Additionally, many advertising services such as newspapers and magazines include cheap or free graphic design with the purchase of ad space. This can be misleading to businesses on a budget that don’t know that this work is often done by rookie designers that don’t research your branding before creating these designs. Branding packs eliminate this issue, giving instructions that are sensible even to the layperson and guaranteeing that your business’ identity remains intact across all marketing materials, even when taking advantage of free services.