Graphic Design 101 – Tips and Tricks
-Clarissa Burrows
What is graphic design? Graphic design encompasses all the visuals your brand or business uses across the board. From logos to letterheads, email signatures to social media posts, website imagery to company profiles. There is graphic design in all aspects of a business.
Graphic design is important. People are visual creatures, and first impressions and snap judgements will be made based entirely on looks. This absolutely extends to businesses and brands. Every design element a business uses has a psychological reason behind it and if you do it wrong, people will feel your business or brand is disjointed and confusing. Done correctly however, graphic design can cause people to literally feel the things you want them to feel when they look at your branding.
Obviously, the main reason for good graphic design is to ensure that your branding stands out from the crowd.
Here are some tips and tricks you should keep in mind when it comes to design:
👁 Company CI
If you have a business, you need a company corporate image and brand guide. Not a vague, “Oh we like the colour purple, kind of, maybe”. It needs to be a full on document detailing your company’s specific visual identity. It needs to include things like the exact pantone colour codes present in your logo, a high resolution logo, the exact typeface you’ll use, the iconography that represents your business and the tone of voice your company will speak in.
This creates consistency and guides graphic designers when they’re designing things for you by helping them ensure your visual identity remains intact and your designs are obviously you.
Without a brand guide or corporate image, it will be difficult for people to recognise your business in amongst all the others and reconcile your various content with your business.
👁Colour Psychology
Colour psychology is significantly responsible for making customers feel a certain way about your business. Specific colours make people feel specific things and using the correct colours in your branding will subtly cause customers to associate a specific feeling with your business.
There’s a reason fast food chains use the colour orange in their branding, it’s because people feel hungry when they see orange. How cool? Orange also makes a business feel friendly and affordable.
Blue makes people feel a company is trustworthy, secure and reliable, which is why it’s used for hospitals, financial services and insurance companies.
Yellow is bold and eye catching and makes people feel happy, hey McDonalds, we see what you did there!
Red is tricky, it denotes excitement and passion but may also express danger so use red with caution.
Green brings health and freshness, to mind which is why grocery stores might use it. It also makes people think of peace, serenity and money.
Purple is creative and imaginative, pink is feminine, gentle and soft, while black expresses masculinity, business and luxury.
Lastly, white makes people feel your business is transparent with nothing to hide and highly functional, think, Apple’s branding.
Colour combinations also create emotions in people so using various colours together is also an option. Colour is important and communicates even if you aren’t thinking about it. Done wrong, the colours you use may well make customers feel confused and unsure about what your company does, but done right, customers may naturally gravitate to your company when they need your services.
👁Imagery
The imagery you use in your branding is incredibly important too. You need to consider the way you want people to see your company and how you can remain recognizable. Are you using cartoon style doodles or sleek images with lots of negative space? Are you using a particular style of photography featuring certain colours or are you using abstract images? How many words are you using on your images? Where will your logo go on images?
All these things need to be carefully considered and then you need to stick to that throughout to keep consistency and reliability for your customers.
👁Typeface
The font you use is something to consider too. Mostly, is the font you’re using for your business outdated? Yes, typefaces can become outdated, for example, when last have you seen anyone using the Papyrus font and not on your old school project on Ancient Egypt. For other fonts, it’s just universally agreed that they’re not to be used at all, ever, for any reason, Comic Sans, we’re looking at you!
If your graphic design is all over the place and confusing people will likely trust your business less than if your imagery was consistent. It becomes a thing of, “If you can’t even properly represent yourself, I don’t believe you can do your job correctly”. Which is not something you want.
Graphic design has a lot of moving parts to consider, but it is genuinely so important. This is one of those things where just hiring the professionals will save you time and effort, and we’re not just saying that because we offer graphic design services. Graphic design is not really something you can DIY without experience as your design may well end up looking like a flyer for the church jumble sale…
Let us help. We can make sure your design speaks for you and says what you need it to say, every time. Without fail.
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