If you ask the average person what they think graphic design is, they'll probably tell you it's the ability to create images with computers. While not entirely unrelated--In reality-- it's a lot more complicated than that. Graphic design is the combination of text and imagery to communicate ideas. Businesses utilize graphic design to build logos, packaging, websites, advertisements, and all elements of their branding. Small business branding's success is made on the competent utilization of graphic design to communicate your services and your values. With the help of a brand design agency, you can ensure that your design says exactly what you want about your business. Below are some of the most important things your brand design tells people about your business. When you break it down, all visual communication relies on symbols. Even written languages like the English alphabet are just arbitrary symbols combined in different ways. Our brains seek out such images and work to ascribe meaning to them. That's why business logos are so important: they provide a visual that identifies a company instantly aside from their name. We process and recognize images 60,000 times faster than we do text, so it's no surprise that logos and associated brand imagery become so recognizable and iconic. That said, this rapid recognition means your logo needs to give an accurate "sense" of what your business is. This could represent brand values or a portrayal of what you want your customers to feel, like warmth or joy, through visual cues like color choice and line weight. A customer's first encounter with your visual branding will form their first impression of your business. The ability to bring them back to that moment whenever they see your branding is a powerful thing, but it also requires consistent design choices across all the platforms you use to communicate. Consistent tone requires a great deal of attention to maintain: things like fonts, color choices, text formatting, and even word choice play a role in shaping your branding. However, it's this consistency that creates familiarity and loyalty among customers: if they like your branding and know what to expect from your business, they'll feel more compelled to choose your business over competitors. A recurring problem in business branding is communicating what you want within a small amount of space. Being succinct is vital to leaving a meaningful impression on customers and holding their attention. Even in mediums where space seemingly isn't an issue, like a webpage, keeping messaging brief while still communicating everything you want gives you an advantage over your competitors. By its nature, graphic design utilizes images and text to allow visuals like images to carry the weight of communication. We see it most often with graphs and infographics, where you can quickly communicate complicated subjects in a simpler form through images and text. The saying "less is more" holds true even when sharing ideas, and efficient graphic design makes this more powerful. Deciding what to present with text and representing with other visual means can determine who quickly information is processed correctly. Every part of your branding comes together to form the basis of an identity you want to present to your public. With design playing into every visual aspect of this, it follows that your design choices will play a major role in your brand's identity. It's yet another reason why you shouldn't make design choices lightly. The design elements you choose to represent your business may convey what you want. Still, without adequate knowledge or testing, they could fail to stand out against your competition, or worse, fail to catch customer attention at all. A brand consultant or branding agency like Carrboro Creative will carefully balance your brand's message with a design that truly stands out, be it through your web presence, packaging, advertisements, or other visual mediums. It can be difficult for a single person to have a broad enough view to consider all these things at once when working on designs for a business, but an experienced team can get it done. And getting the design right the first time is important. You can always change it later if you feel it's necessary, but doing so costs time and money. Impactful design can be hard to come up with unless you have the right creative team behind you. At Carrboro Creative, our carrboro-based design agency is a team of creatives that live and breathe graphic design. They artfully and skillfully take information and use design best practices to create visual hierarchies, simplify information, and develop graphics to help tell a story. Our graphic designers will bring your idea to life digitally and in print and we love taking on new projects of all kinds. Get in touch today for a free quote on your next project and let’s work together.4 Things Your Brand Design Does for You
1. Your Brand Creates the First Impression
2. Your Brand Sets a Consistent Tone
3. Your Brand Simplifies Communication
4. Your Brand Makes Your Identity Unique
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