Oi. Graphic Design gets you more sales.

“Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives.” — Wikipedia.

“TheScience which involves visual representation to an appropriate audience”— Bine Moukouri.

The key words here are “social groups” and “audience”. Just like any form of communication, information that is passed to the wrong audience is a dismal waste. Imagine designing a flyer for a kids party and your graphic designer uses photos of strippers. Or a vegetarian event, and they choose to use sausages as the main imagery in the marketing material.

Get it?

Simply put. People are only going to concern themselves with information that is meant for them. Going against this very fundamental rule of design is a sure way to waste money and time.

All say “wha”….

Like Doctors and Engineers, Graphic Designers are solution-oriented and earn a living from providing solutions for brands.

Marketing is about selling. A game of winning hearts and minds. Most times without them ever having used your product / service / experience. This is how Graphic Design solves marketing problems.

These are the big three visual marketing problems;

-Information Overload

-Time

-Story Telling

1.) INFORMATION OVERLOAD

In a world fighting for your attention, our brains are constantly working to filter out the unnecessary. The same thing applies with potential clients, customers, and the undecided. A study from Microsoft Corp says the human attention span is about eight seconds. Picture yourself standing at the famous TIMES SQUARE in the U.S or PICCADILLY CIRCUS in London, UK. There’s a battle of the brands. We’re bombarded with flyers, billboards, music, videos, performances etc. between competing and non-competing brands.

Get ready to get your hearts broken, but you don’t even know your brain has assimilated all of this information it receives through your senses – it considers a lot of that information unimportant.

Graphic design makes visuals more memorable. He who gets attention with stronger and more relevant visuals, wins.

2.) TIME.

Marketing is a game of Speed. He who wins the heart fastest, wins the mind first. After all, the brain is only 12 inches from the heart.

Clients and potential investors don’t have time. We are living in a world where the clock governs how we go about our lives. Everyone is in a hurry, with an eight second attention span, there’s no time to spare.

Imagine a student at university who is interested in film. The Challenge is to get your message across and win him/her over within those eight seconds and make them want to stop to read before they get distracted or decide to go about their day and make sure they come back to your flyer later.

3.) STORYTELLING

Marketing is about telling stories to people that didn’t know they wanted to hear them.He who tells the whole story in less words wins. Imagine two ads from Nike Pembrokeshire (Could happen). A very prominent and rising trend in the Pembrokeshire Graphic Design space is to try and cram all of this information on an A4 / A3 poster. The client requests bold text, large photos and wants it all to fit on one poster. We'll call this poster A.

I would advise instead, to pull out just a few words, these would be large. And perhaps a smaller sentence that acts as your call to action. Let's calll this poster B.

So which is easier to read?

A or B?

‘B’ right?

Because they went straight to the point. The problem with A is over explaining. After just two seconds, poster A will be forgotten about.

Why? Aint no one got time for dat!

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — Leonardo da Vinci.