The Right Graphic Design Can Make a Huge Difference
Many business owners don’t think much about their graphic design. It’s just simple images and colors, it really doesn’t matter in the long run. However, they couldn’t be more wrong – your graphic design and website layout can greatly improve your ROI.
Why is graphic design so important? What goes into graphic design? What should you consider? These are all really important questions that should be easy to answer. If you’re still not sure how to answer them, don’t worry. We’ll go over everything you need to know about graphic design and how it can make a huge difference in your business.
What Goes Into Graphic Design
There’s a lot of components to graphic design. Most people think it’s just how things look and, at a very high level, they’re right. However, each component of a website, brochure or company’s aesthetics must be painstakingly considered before making a decision.
Below, you can see a few of the most important aspects of graphic design that you need to consider when branding your website.
Font and Size
The font on your website, written content and packaging is very very important. Going with Times New Roman or Arial isn’t going to cut it – you need to think about what font you want associated with your brand. Something with a little more pizazz is going to help users remember your brand. Also, making headers a different font than your copy text helps people skim your products/websites and helps them understand if this is what they’re looking for.
However, you need to be careful when selecting a font. Obviously, you want something that stands out but you don’t want to go crazy. Something like Comic Sans is very out of style and a bit much.
The size of the font makes a huge difference as well. Did you know that a line length of over 60 characters is much less likely to be read. Also, smaller font is much harder for people to read, especially if it’s on a computer. You need to think about these minor details if you expect people to read content to get valuable information about your company. Otherwise, you’ll see a low conversion rate on your website since no one is willing to read your copy.
Colors
Selecting your brand colors isn’t something you do at the snap of your fingers. All colors give people a subconscious feeling whether you realize it or not. Blue is a very cool calm color, red is associated with urgency and green is all about money. You must understand the psychological effects of colors on potential buyers before selecting them for your brand colors.
You also don’t want to make a website/print ad/product package that looks like a bag of skittles. You’re going to need to understand how colors work together and select a primary, secondary and a couple tertiary colors. Limiting yourself this way keeps the website looking clean and consistent. Loud colors will scare people away!
Just picking brand colors isn’t all you need to consider. We can’t tell you how many people are so unwilling to stick to brand colors. Blue isn’t just blue – even minor changes are very easy to see the difference. You need to know the exact hex codes of your brand colors. Consistency is the key!
Website Layout
Once you have font and color, you need to decide how it’s displayed to the user. This is where your website’s layout comes into play. Many of the things we’re about to discuss with a website can be used with product packaging and print advertising.
First, make sure everything has room to breath. What does that mean? You’re going to want to have consistent margins so elements of the site aren’t on the edge of the screen or overlapping with other elements. For instance, you’re going to want most of your content to fall within 65% – 75% of the screen width. The key is to make your copy’s length length around 60 characters. It’ll also look much neater.
You also want to make sure your content and images tell a story as you navigate through the website. You don’t want a hodge-podge of unrelated images and content on each page, otherwise users will find it difficult to navigate through your website.
As far as the amount of content you want on each page, you want to be careful. For instance, if you put too much on the page, most users will become overwhelmed. In fact, about 50% of the people will leave the page by the time they scroll through 33% of the page. The shorter the better. On the other hand, you’ll want around 500 words in order to get the page to rank well with SEO. You need to find that happy balance when designing your website.
When it comes to website specifically, many companies love using weird transitions and fading tricks to make the site more visually interesting. You even see many marketing agencies go this route with their customer’s websites. However, while it may seem visually interesting, you’re giving your users visual overload. It also slows down your website’s site speed.
Why is site speed so important? Not only is site speed one of Google’s biggest ranking factors, but you see websites with slow site speeds have a higher bounce rate. That means the user isn’t performing any actions on your websites. The way you layout your website, the image file size, the neatness of your code and the use of transitions can all affect your website’s site speed and needs to be considered.
Images
The images you pick for your website/print ads is very important as well. Obviously, many companies use stock photos. It’s important that they’re very bright, match the tone of what you’re creating, fit the narrative you’re trying to tell and, if possible, include people (seeing another human helps users connect with the message). If you’re creating a product package, make sure you have images of the product in use so it’s understanding what it does.
How the images are used on your advertisement or website makes a huge difference. You don’t want the image dominate the entire ad because the text will get lost. However, when it’s too small, people get distracted trying to figure out what it is. It needs to be a readable size without taking away from the power of the text.
Where the image is placed matters too. This is especially important when it comes to building a website. Centering the image is what most people think is the best idea, however, we recommend not going this route. Many times right or left aligning images with relevant text on the other side is your best option. This gives people a written and visual example of what’s being discussed. Some other options are back ground images or more interesting overlapping options. How ever you display your images, it has to be consistent with the rest of your website and make sense with the narrative you’re trying to tell.
Why is Graphic Design Important?
The question still remains: why is graphic design so important. It’s pretty clear that graphic design as a direct impact on your SEO. The amount of content you have on each page needs to be determined: too long negatively affects your graphic design but too short gives you no SEO benefits. Also, the image size, website layout and neatness of the code can hurt your site speed – a major SEO ranking factor for Google.
Even more importantly, your graphic design can hurt your ROI. Bad packaging can cause people to avoid your product, poorly designed print ads can cause people to avoid or forget your brand and bad websites will have a high bounce rate. You want something that’s neat and organized while still having pizazz to draw in new customers.
Can Anyone Do Graphic Design for You?
It seems like there are so many freelance graphic designs out there. Also, many company owners and directors think that they can design their brand perfectly. However, it takes a specially trained individual to get the most of your graphic design.
It’s more than picking colors and images – it’s telling a story that’s going to get people the convert on your website. It’s designing images, ads and packaging that’s going to help people understand what you offer and visualize the need for your product/service. Sure anyone could try graphic design but it takes a true graphic designer to ensure an improvement on your ROI.
The Right Graphic Design Can Make a Huge Difference
After reading this article, we hope you understand the importance of your company’s graphic design. It’s not something that should be an afterthought and is the image of your brand. Whether it’s designing images from scratch, picking stock photos, understanding the purpose of using specific colors and developing a new website, you need to put a major effort towards your graphic design. Finding a high quality, effective and trustworthy graphic designer is the key to getting the most out of your graphic design.
