Design Time!
Whether it’s rolling out a new menu for your restaurant or developing a series of print or digital ads, how those items look is extremely important. Graphic design is a key aspect of your overall marketing, both from a standpoint of catching your audience’s attention and ensuring how your business is being portrayed.
Here are some important things to keep in mind in regards to graphic design that will help produce the best possible results:
Color Scheme/Branding: If you don’t already, having established brand standards will go a long way in beginning to develop a consistent look and feel. You may have a logo, but working with a designer to create a set of rules for how that logo should and should not be implemented is a necessary first step to avoid it being misused. On that same note, you should have approved fonts, and a color scheme clearly defined as well. This will lead to easier and more cohesive design as you move forward.
Photography: Whether it’s a billboard, a print ad, or a simple event poster, using high-quality photos is a crucial part of how that final piece will look. Using images that are low resolution or too dark and not properly edited will lead to even the best-designed materials looking average at best. Capturing high-quality photos of your products or business should be something you do on a regular basis to ensure that you have plenty of options to work from.
Keep It Simple: There is a basic rule when it comes to most design projects, which is to keep things simple. This is normally an aspect of design that can be the most difficult to grasp and often requires a trained eye. Having the correct amount of white (or negative) space is essential to producing clean and easy-to-comprehend communications. Passive white space is what occurs naturally between lines of text or words. Active white spaces are areas that are deliberately added to direct the viewer to the most important parts of the piece. The proper use of white space can take a mix of crowded text and images and make it understandable and dynamic.
We have only really begun to scratch the surface as to what goes into truly great graphic design, but these three key concepts will help you to begin to identify some of the things that are the most important. Working with a trained graphic designer can go a long way and can be much more affordable than one might think.
At Cambium, we help clients of all types and sizes with their graphic design needs. If you’re interested in learning more about our services let us know!