One of the biggest marketing challenges today is coming up with high quality content. A result is many people underestimate the importance of graphic design, especially in a city like Toronto. I visited a prospect who has been doing all of their ads in-house (I don’t mean they had a designer on staff). She knew there was a problem, thought they had too many words. I disagreed on the word count. They were just poorly designed. I knew I could take the same content and make it look immeasurably better. This was striking compared to the professionally designed ads the competition was running.

Graphic design can be so subjective and abstract, it can be really hard to articulate what it is you like and don’t like about designs. You may not realize consciously that something looks good, or bad, or creates strong impressions.

The Part of Your Customer’s Brain That Makes Business Decisions is Visual

I went to a sales seminar by a man who talked about how important images are to a sale because, as evolved as we like to think ourselves, we still make decisions in our reptilian brain, in seconds. You know the saying: a picture says a thousand words. Yes, as a graphic designer I was in love, but he did have scientific evidence that I won’t go in to.

What people see is incredibly important to conveying messages, and should not be taken for granted. We like to think that we make decisions with our logical mind, that we’re sifting through data and weighing the facts. Meanwhile we’re really using our logical mind to assemble the facts in favor of the decisions that we’ve already made.

The example he gave was walking down a path in a park when he saw something that looked like a snake. Our self-preservation instincts tell us to fear them. So, his reptilian brain hijacked his body and had him leaping out-of-the-way before his logical brain could process that it was just a stick.

As this was part of a sales seminar, it did relate directly to presentations and advertising – graphic design is way more important to the decision process that people think. Especially in a large and competitive market like Toronto.

What Does Your Graphic Design Say About Your Company?

When it comes to graphic design people simply don’t realize how big of an impact it has. I’m not just talking about the images chosen, but the typography, the colours, the composition of a piece. You may think bright colours and lots of starbursts gets attention, but clean design goes a long way to making all that content easier to digest.

Developing content is still a huge challenge, even for us. However, the subtle elements can take your marketing tools from amateurish to sophisticated – and what does that say about your company?