What Design Can Do For Your Business

You know what they say: you only have one chance to make a first impression. Whether it’s your website or the logo in your email signature, potential customers will judge a business in just a few seconds based on visual appeal alone. High-quality graphic design gives businesses credibility – and that’s priceless. No matter how great a product or service, with poor design, it’s unlikely anyone will take your website seriously or keep your email long enough to find out.

Solid graphic design provides branding consistency across every visual, customer-facing aspect of your business. A professional graphic artist will use precise colours, typefaces, imagery, and tone of voice for everything he or she touches. This way, customers have the same experience visiting a company’s website as they do reading its brochure. Think of it as a kind of alliteration – it helps the business become recognisable and memorable. Plus, consistency symbolises professionalism, and professionalism symbolises trustworthiness.

A slick website is nice to have. A slick website that converts is even nicer. Design isn’t just about making things look pretty; effective design should entice and persuade. A smartly designed website can direct your visitors to take action, like clicking a “buy” button for instance. A well-crafted pamphlet compels readers to keep turning pages. Professional graphic design has the potential to deliver measurable results for your business.

When businesses don’t take graphic design seriously in the beginning, they will more than likely go through a design overhaul eventually – in some cases, more than once. However, quality design has longevity. Paying for great graphic design once can be more cost-effective than paying for sub-standard design multiple times. Not to mention, redesigning a business’ image over and over wastes time and can be detrimental to your brand. Many business owners understand the value of great design. Many others, unfortunately, don’t.

The logo on your sign looks different from the one on your letterhead. The colours on your business card are not reflected on your website. Your special offer posters are done in an entirely different style from your sales brochures. Consistent branding is the hallmark of a truly professional firm. Just look at any large, successful firm and you’ll see the same logo, colours and typefaces carried throughout all of their literature and websites. It makes their material instantly recognisable, and that translates into brand recognition and sales.

A good graphic design agency takes the time and cares to understand your audience – the people most likely to buy your products or services. They get a sense of what will appeal to your customers and design your material accordingly. If your customers are practical-minded business people, the design might be simple, well-organised and straightforward. If your customers are fashion-conscious young people, the design might be colourful and flamboyant. Promotion for a health spa might be soft and natural, while an engineering website might be hard-edged and bold. A good designer knows how to connect to your audience and appeal to them.

A picture paints a thousand words, well, maybe not. According to Japanese studies into information processing, it’s closer to 80 words, but a picture certainly has the power to communicate a complex message faster than a paragraph ever can. This is going to be a crucial tactic for businesses to capture audiences in the near future. With decreasing attention spans in young audiences, marketing messages need to be delivered as quickly as possible and images are still the best way to do this. With small screen mobile and tablet technology becoming more prevalent than the larger screens of desktops and laptops, modern audiences aren’t as willing to invest time in reading your message. Images are what the future of communication is about. As wearable technology (smartwatches, virtual reality headsets, etc.) begin to jump out of technology blogs into the real world, screens are getting smaller and smaller. Having a graphic designer on hand who can not only create visuals that will be effective at these smaller sizes but also has the knowledge to adapt your digital marketing and messages to different screen sizes, will be crucial to your success as technology changes.

If you’re busy running your business, you don’t have the time or expertise to handle your design in-house. Good design is not something you stumble upon. It’s a combination of skills that require a specialist education and a lot of experience. It will take you years of dedication to master the software needed to complete all your graphic design work to a professional level. The Adobe suite, flash animations, video editing – most graphic designers will come with all these skills intact, ready to use them to your advantage.

Which file types work in the which situations? Where’s the best place to get your marketing materials printed and how much do you need to spend to get decent quality? How do you make yourself look good in your photo ID picture? There are many graphic design related questions relevant to modern business which you can only really learn the answer to through experience. Professional designers have the experience to answer all these questions and more. Designers will also be able to use their photographic editing and retouching skills to capture your company’s key moments and imagery across your website, marketing materials and social media.

Images not only improve but have been shown to be a vital part of a company’s marketing mix. For marketing campaigns, quality graphics have proven time and time again to be one of the (if not the) most important factors to their success. This is particularly true of content marketing as illustrated by the statistics below:

If your internal communications, operations folders, website, and business cards are amateur and inconsistent, they won’t inspire much pride in your employees. If they are created and managed by a professional graphic designer, however, your employees will acquire a whole different perspective of the company they are working for. Good design inspires people. While it’s a bit more obvious that well designed external communications can attract new customers, internal communications are often overlooked. By creating a new website and fine-tuning internal communication materials, your employees will consider themselves to be working for a cutting edge company. They might even become more likely to put in extra effort in helping your business succeed.