It’s fairly common knowledge within the industry we work in that a lot of decisions are made upon first impressions. With a visually aware consumer becoming more and more confident in their decisions and the power of the choices they make, making a good first impression with your branding, your graphic design, and your printed material is vital to ensuring you don’t turn customers off and send them towards your competitors.
Making a good first impression is not as hard as it sounds, and there are some simple things you can put into place to make sure you do. At the same time, it makes sense to put into action some things that help sustain that good impression – backing up the positive message you’re sending out about your company and helping potential customers understand who you are and what you’re all about.
Ethics have become a talking point amongst branding experts, graphics designers and digital marketers – much of the graphic design we see today for companies across the country very closely follows the ethics and the message the company are trying to convey – great examples of this are the clean, simple message of Finisterre, or festivals such as Somersault Festival that doesn’t really need to say much else aside from what their branding already does. To help you along the way, here are a few ideas of how your graphic design can ensure you make customers feel good about stumbling across you.
Consistency
Upon first coming across your graphic design – whether online or printed, it’ll be alarmingly obvious to newcomers if there isn’t a consistent design, look and ‘feel’ across your site. Ensure you keep images, typography, layout and for the most part colours working in tandem with each other and balancing out each aspect of your design.
Use good design to build your credibility
It’s important to make sure you are using your design not just to convey information and look pretty – you need it to build your credibility and gain users’ trust in the process. As well as consistency across your branding, you can do this by ensuring that before the design process, you spend a good amount of time deciding what users want and what they’re looking for in the look and feel of a company they’re about to invest money in.
Make it noteworthy
Make your graphic design something that you feel customers may want to tell their friends about. It might be the fact that it’s so simple it fits with your whole company philosophy, or so artistic and intricate that they’ve never seen anything like it in the past. It makes sense to invest in good graphic design for this reason – make it memorable.
Typography
With a huge variety of fonts out there – many of which are incredibly well handcrafted – using a consistent and attractive typography is a must to making sure your users aren’t confused or left wanting by your brand message. Make sure it’s striking but fits in with the overall feel of the site.
Identify key elements
It is said that users form design opinions in less than a second when arriving upon your graphics and branding for the first time. One way to make sure you make a good first impression is to identify key elements within your branding – look at eyetracking studies and try to see what your users will see. What stands out – and what layout is required to make the most of presenting yourself in the right way.