Graphic design plays an important role in the modern digital marketing environment and often times creates a competitive edge for companies. Graphic design fills a number of roles, including reaching the target audience, providing deliverables such as marketing materials, a strong business logo, search icons, and even a user interface helping expand brand recognition through products and services.
There are many companies that exist who have mastered the art of communicating ideas and concepts through their brand, we can learn from what those graphic designer’s have accomplished in respect to brand visibility for their respective business stand out.
There have been many studies showing that design directly and significantly improves all monetary aspects of the business, many design-led businesses outperformed the financial times stock exchange 100 by more than 200% in the past decade.
Graphic Design Will Give You An Edge In Marketing
An indispensable component of marketing today, several businesses out there have conquered the act of graphic designing, such as Apple. Apple has designed itself in a way that allows for clear communication of various concepts, but something they are very good at is a first impression. A first impression in the world of marketing can be the difference between success and failure both in and out of the digital marketing space, even the space of screen readers. A few different hidden background processes help to arrive at the first impression, for both sighted and vision impaired users.
A Lasting First Impression
Existing customers and prospective ones will have an impression regarding the brand logo and overall graphic elements of a business. This potential for a lasting first impression goes a long way, and can end up determining whether or not a customer goes with you versus the competition from just the outward appearance.
Making an impact on your target market through visual appeal is absolutely vital for businesses. This is just the beginning to having a professional designer as part of your team creating marketing collateral.
Creating Brand Identity
Establishing a business image is accomplished through a well-thought out graphic design plan and strategy. Brand recognition and visual identity are key when it comes to making the first impression and to gain high visibility, but on top of that your identity needs to communicate what your business represents to your target audience through accurate form labels .
Happy, excited, mellow, laid back, representing the business ideas, ideals and mood through graphic design and communicating them effectively will make an enormous impact on marketing efforts towards creating a successful business. Successful marketing efforts hinge and thrive off of a cohesive brand identity.
Design For Social Media Platforms
While most business have an entire website dedicated to their business, a strong tool for taking advantage of the graphic design being used by businesses is creating an online presence. A strong brand identity easily converts to a good social media profile even if that just means social media icons. Digital marketing in conjunction with web design can deepen the effects of first impressions and overall impressions on the digital design.
If someone can’t make up their mind upon first seeing some sort of marketing collateral, they may follow the website or social media profile pipeline and proceed to make a mental decision on whether or not they like the digital branding. Sometimes, the target audience may be a group of people that are very keen on using social media, whether its to share their appreciation of a product or service or just for keeping track of updates, making it all the more important to create a presence on social media platforms.
Building Credibility Through Graphic Design
An impactful first impression, a strong brand identity, and online presence through social media all revolve around one concept – credibility. A cohesiveness that is shown through graphic design, and appropriate visual aids can create an immense amount of trust for the customer. The important thing here is to recognize that credibility is established through synergy of all aspects of digital marketing materials, even things you wouldn’t expect like building your website’s form screen reader adjustments.
Digital Marketing Compliance
Lots of online spaces strive to create as few limitations as possible, most social media platforms have built functionality for the visually impaired with screen reader profile, or a blind users profile (Twitter recently started allowing users to add alt text to images they upload). One of the best fitting tools for a non-sighted user is a Screen reader, so because of this many companies strive for screen reader optimization through screen reader adjustments within a website. This is basically to ensure blind users visiting their websites are able to experience the website in full by using screen readers. People that are incapable of optical character recognition still have accessible rich internet applications that they use to navigate the internet.
When explained, this makes a lot of sense, but much of the internet has yet to implement important screen reader requirements. The reason for this overall is because it isn’t taken into consideration in the design process. It would be more common for websites to be compatible with screen readers if they had been designed with popular screen readers in mind. Creating web content accessible by non sighted users will become more prevalent in the near future.
This doesn’t stop at screen readers, a lot of people can’t see colors the same as the general population, while implementing an adequate technological solution for these isn’t as hard as it is for non-sighted users, it is still important and can be as simple as avoiding css flashing transitions or increased contrast.
This type of compliance even extends to cognitive disability profile assisting the end user, profiles that hide images or a profile enables epileptic users, or even preventing or avoiding automatic audio playing with an option lets users mute especially for screen reader users viewing content through a screen reader mode.
Even something along the lines of a keyboard focus or keyboard navigation optimization, would enable certain users to navigate more easily. Browsers that comprise over 95% of the user market share are capable of most or all of these assistive technologies.
This aspect of hidden design is much easier to implement as long as it is in mind from the beginning of the graphic design process and will become more important as more non-sighted and vision impaired users are provided screen readers and vision impaired profile and background process scans for assistive profiles are more common.
Summing Up
Graphic design plays an absolutely vital role in a successful business. Overall, it is responsible for visual first impressions, it channels the identity of the brand itself, and it allows for ease of expansion of online presence through social media platforms to emphasize essential elements by provide accurate form labels.
In venturing to the online space, digital compliance is another aspect of online presence that is rooted in graphic design as the screen reader enters the picture. In one way or another, graphic design is going to be tied into your businesses physical manifestation in the outside world, thus making it absolutely vital.
Cheers,
Samuel Sosa
J.O. Agency
