What is Graphic Design, and How Is it Important in Your Business?

The chances are that you have some concept of what graphic design is and how it can benefit your business. Whatever kind of business you have, you have probably already utilized some sort of essential graphic design.

However, graphic design is too often underutilized and underemphasized in a number of different businesses. This is unfortunate, since graphic design may be one of the most affordable and effective strategies in your arsenal. 

Here’s what you need to know about why graphic design is so essential for your business.

Modern Challenges in Graphic Design 

Graphic design has existed, in some form or other, since human beings have been putting images on surfaces. However, the modern age offers new opportunities as well as new challenges do businesses that need to utilize graphic design. Here are a few of the modern challenges of graphic design and how they might affect your business:

Difficult to Get and Keep Attention

Consumers are more swamped with advertising and other media than ever before. That means you need more and more eye-catching graphics and visuals to get the attention of consumers. 

Attention spans are shorter as well, so you have less time to deliver your marketing effectively. While you may have more access to viewers than ever before, keeping those viewers focused on you and interested in your message may be harder than ever before. 

Designing for Platforms

Graphic design used to mean one or two layouts for print and perhaps putting together a video clip and some product packaging. It was much easier for advertisers to create the media they needed for their advertising goals. 

However, there are now a staggering number of platforms where you will likely want to have a presence to take full advantage of your advertising opportunities. Each of these platforms has its own rules and regulations about how to post media, what size it should be, and more. 

This can make it much more difficult and more frustrating for a small or even medium-sized business to produce all of the media that they need. This is especially true when you consider that it takes more media than it used to to get the attention of consumers and motivate their behaviors. 

Some business owners find themselves in a rat race with the consumer in which they are always trying to produce enough media but end up producing lower and lower quality media, which is more and more likely to be ignored by the consumer. This is one of the reasons that while it is easier to create your own graphic content than ever before, it is more essential than previously to hire a skilled graphic designer to create visuals for you. 

A professional graphic design team can continuously create extremely high quality and creative graphics to meet your advertising and branding goals on all of the important platforms, including search engines, social media, and e-commerce. 

What is Graphic Design?

When most of us think about graphic design, we’re thinking about static visuals. These visuals absolutely are considered graphic design, but graphic design goes much further than static visuals. Here are a few examples of how graphic design can be utilized in your business

• Branding. Graphic design encompasses the sort of brand design that businesses need to create an identity for themselves, which can form a strong and memorable connection in consumers’ minds.
• Product graphics. Whether you have a product to sell or you want great branding for products to help advertise your service, a graphic designer can help you design products with graphics that are compelling and appealing to customers.
• Package graphics. Too often, businesses pay attention to how their products will look and what kind of branding they will carry, but they overlook how the packaging will appear. A great graphic designer can make the packaging as appealing and appropriate to your brand image as the product itself.
• Point-of-purchase graphics. Whether you’re selling your product or service in person or online, the graphics that you present to your customer when they are ready to make a purchase matter. The right graphics can make the difference between a sale and a no-sale. They can even stimulate an upsell where one would otherwise not have been possible. 

Purpose of Graphic Design

Graphic design often serves more than one purpose simultaneously. Two things that graphic design is nearly always meant to accomplish is to inform or persuade. 

Graphic design often does both of these things at once. The right sort of informative graphic design can very frequently sway the opinion of the consumer simply by the presentation of information. This is a great way for graphic design to influence the opinion of consumers without giving off the impression of being manipulative or self-serving as advertising so often is accused of. Here is a little bit more about the two primary purposes of graphic design, as well as some secondary purposes.

Inform

Many people find visuals to be more informative than text. This may be especially true in an increasingly distractible culture that has a harder time focusing on long blocks of text. An infographic can go further to communicate important points than text alone. 

Graphic headlines are an excellent way to emphasize the most important points about your products to customers. Diagram, charts, and other visual representations of information can deliver your message and persuade your customers that you are an authority on a subject. 

Persuade 

Because visuals operate outside of more typical and transparent communication like speech, they can be much more persuasive much less transparently than other forms of communication. The right visual can inspire emotions like fear or excitement to motivate a purchase or another action in a customer. They can also elicit feelings of envy or a sense of a problem in need of a solution. 

Brand

The right graphic design for your business is an effective way to communicate your brand colors, visuals, and messaging, all without taking up very much room on physical goods or digital space. In fact, some degree of graphic design is essential for you to effectively brand your business. Even the simplest business concepts have a logo and some other basic branding.

Why is Graphic Design so Effective?

Graphic design is generally much less likely to strike a consumer as being manipulative or self-serving. Visuals go beyond words to provide very effective communication without being heavy-handed. When done properly, good graphic design improves customer impressions and motivates behavior without the customer being aware of it. 

Communication Beyond Language

Even if you are not directly marketing towards non-English speaking customers, you probably don’t want to rule out the possibility of these kinds of sales. Graphics offer communication that goes beyond words and language to communicate in a deeper and more essential sort of language. This is a good way to give yourself the opportunity to expand sales to non-English customers without the need for translation services 

Choose Quality Graphic Design

If you have an artistic leaning, you may want to give your own graphic design a try. However, graphic design has many more components than just visual appeal. You need a company that is experienced in the sort of market research and graphic design best practices that are necessary for meaningful and prompt success. 

Sources

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-graphic-design-social-media

https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/profcommsontario/chapte

http://www.umich.edu/~webteam/desmich/gdap/importance.html