5 ways that graphic design can make your business grow

Graphic design can help you strengthen the emotional connection that your customers feel towards your brand. Therefore graphic design has the power to directly increase your business sales.

Everyone knows that effective graphic design has to look great, but there’s more to it than that. Today’s business focus is on user experience (UX), and for graphic design to be effective at delivering business objectives, it must also address UX. 

Pragmatically, effective graphic design works in unison with UX to enhance user satisfaction and deliver your marketing objectives. 

For more on this, please see our article: 5 ways to tell if your graphic design is bad for your user experience.

So, now we understand more about what makes graphic design effective, let’s explore how it will help your business grow. 

1. Make a good first impression 

The saying goes, ‘you only have one chance to make a good impression.’ While that cliché is more than just a little tired, it remains ultimately true. First impressions really do count. Your potential customers take just a few seconds to judge you. For instance, the credibility of your website is judged on aesthetics 75% of the time, and 88% of visitors are unlikely to return following a bad experience. 

Effective graphic design will stir the imaginations of your visitors and ensure they stick around long enough to engage with your brand. 

To make a good impression, it’s critically important to focus on UX; understand your customers and place them at the centre of your design process. But if what you present fails to connect visually, all is lost, and you are unlikely to get a second chance to engage. 

Effective graphic design will get you noticed by your potential customers. Skilled graphics designers are adept at using all the elements of images, graphics, and space to make you stand out from the barrage of images and information your customers face every day; an estimated 34 Gb worth. 

2. Customers will better understand your story

Effective graphic design involves much more than looking pretty. It should help your customers understand your brand story. While words may be a part of your narrative, effective graphic design will add feeling and emotion to those words, enhancing understanding while providing additional insights. Even at a basic level, the choice of the right font and colour scheme can help communicate your message, but it goes much further than that. 

Good stories are memorable, and if you don’t create an unforgettable story, your product will fail to appeal to your audience. As argued in Forbes, the strategic narrative has been used by many big brands to develop new visions that have had significant impacts on generations of consumers; and each of these stories is underpinned by extraordinarily effective graphic design.  

Storytelling is embedded in our psyche and innate to our communication. We have been telling stories for at least 40,000 years; our identity and culture is embedded in them. The first stories were visual scrawls painted on cave walls. Later we added words and music. In our modern world, effective graphic design serves a similar purpose. 

Effective graphic design gets your story across, compelling people to engage with your brand. And if people like your story, they will share it. 

3. It sets you apart from the competition

Big brands understand the benefits of effective graphic design and how it differentiates them from the competition. Think of any major brand and you will almost certainly be able to visualise their logo, colour scheme, and typeface. Effective graphic design creates an instantly identifiable unique face for your business that sets it apart from that of your competitors.

Without effective graphic design,you risk becoming just one of the rest rather than one of the best. 

But it’s about more than just being recognisable. It should impart a feeling of confidence and trust; it should demonstrate that you believe in yourself and that your customers can safely believe in you too.

4. Consistency enhances your credibility

Effective graphic design retains consistency across all channels. Whether it is your website, app, e-newsletter, advertising, products, or print material, your message shouldn’t venture off-piste. But achieving this isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds. It is easy to frustrate customers by delivering different messages from different channels. 

Customers equate consistency with reliability. This goes beyond typeface, colour, and logos; it involves the integration of every aspect of your message. Without consistency, you risk your customers losing sight of who you are and what you stand for. 

Brand consistency across all aspects of your business will increase your credibility in your customers’ eyes enhancing their trust and loyalty. 

In a nutshell, consistency builds awareness, trust, andauthority; underpinning UX across the total customer journey. 

5. It elevates user experience (UX)

Today progressive businesses put UX at the core of their endeavours. Their goal is to identify and respond to customer needs, adopting an iterative approach aimed at providing prototypes to the hands of users as quickly as possible for generating feedback for further product refinement. In this haste, visual design can sometimes assume second place to usability; something that will be added after all the usability issues have been ironed out. To a degree this makes sense; you can’t make a bad product excellent by painting over the cracks with even great visual design. 

There is, however, a huge potential problem with this approach. Weak, ineffective graphic design can undermine an otherwise excellently designed UX. Consider two apps (or two websites) that deliver effectively identical UX. One is visually appealing, andthe other lacks visual appeal. It’s the former that will get all the attention; users may well judge the latter as unprofessional.  

The bottom line is visual design should elevate UX, and you should incorporate it in your design thinking from the outset. 

Good effective graphic design will always enhance UX; if you don’t believe us ask Apple Inc. 

Final thoughts

Effective graphic design will help your business grow; without it, given our highly competitive environment, your future is likely to be difficult. If you would like to find out more about how our effective design approach can help your business grow, contact us.