Do you and your team have potential ideas for your brand but are struggling to start?
In introducing your brand to the public, one must breathe life into these products and services. You cannot achieve this by words alone nor imageries but by the harmonious use of both—the very essence of graphic design. It communicates your complex layers of desires and messages across an audience in a much simpler yet striking way that leaves them on edge, thinking about your brand.
More and more people and businesses turn to graphic design in communicating their brand. The number of businesses in the US graphic and design industry climbed up to 16,823 as June 2019. Meanwhile, freelance graphic designers account for approximately 90% of the total industry population by 2020. With the evident dominance of visual communication gradually creeping into our lives, creativity continues to prove itself as one of the most indispensable tools that hold immense power in our world right now.
Creating visuals is becoming more critical for businesses and brands in the digital age. Around 90% of information processed in the human brain is visual, which places you in a strong position to tweak your content in your preference so you can get to influence your audience’s buying decisions.
But, if you are struggling to create your visuals, you can always go back to the basics. Want to get more ideas? Here are seven types of graphic design styles you should try for your brand:
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Final Product Design
By its definition, your final product becomes the reflection of all the extensive processes and rigorous research behind it, and most importantly- the manifestation of your brand’s creativity and originality.
It begins with brainstorming and research to ensure there is no risk of copyrights violation, and the visual projects the message properly. Millions of ideas are created and transformed every day, and the last thing you would want to be is ordinary. The type of industry you are in also plays a significant role, from dictating the availability of your tools and resources to how your products and services will be efficiently created and sustained. Initial illustrations and prototypes are important in this graphic design type. It serves as proof of deliberate tailoring and fine-tuning of specific aspects of your products into your envisioned and ideal final product.
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Visual Trademark Design
According to George Costello (2018), visuals are processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text. Because of the competitive nature existing in the marketplace, it is a must for brands to create a lasting imprint on their consumers’ minds to stand out and build a reputation for themselves, eventually establishing their brand identity.
Brand identity consequently constitutes the brand’s personality through the recurring elements appearing in the business’ assets. This is primarily done through manipulating visuals such as color palettes, typography, logos, and image patterns. Aesthetics significantly accounts for effective branding design, but the design aspects must also encapsulate and align with the brand’s goals and guidelines. Doing this will ensure brand consistency and guarantee an enduring impression on the consumer’s part. A visual with a clear message can be actively grasped and digested by the intended audience. It takes up to seven impressions for visitors to recognize a brand’s logo, much more remember the brand identity itself.
You can establish a brand identity by using a uniform design style appropriate for the brand’s personality (e.g. art deco, psychedelic, grunge, minimalist). This requires more versatile and adequate experience by the graphic designer concerning the style’s principles and restrictions.
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Interactive and Convenient User Interface Graphic Design
The consumer’s visual experience with the website or device used is equally as important as his/her impression of the brand. In fact, 94% of consumers will leave a website with poor graphic design, wherein 46% of website visitors equate website design to the brand’s credibility.
It’s pretty unfair to think that all of the brand’s hard work is wasted simply because the consumer got bored, right? Thus, the platform to be used must be eye-catching and easy to navigate for both desktops and mobile devices. The graphic designer must be fluent with programming languages (HTML, Java, etc.) and practice where they might opt to use buttons, micro-interactions, and menus that are user-friendly and engaging.
One can also develop new sections that can be included in the websites to stimulate the users’ interest.
2. Social Media Footprint
Of course, marketing shouldn’t stop within the boundaries of websites but must sprawl over the different platforms on the web.
Whether we like it or not, social media has dominated consumers regardless of age and plays a major role in advertising products and services. Infographics, posts, tweets, official accounts for the brand can rapidly spread the word about business as much as in news and gossip if used correctly. Specifically, tweets with visual assets generate 150% more retweets, whereas Facebook posts with images deliver 230% more engagement. It all boils down to social creativity and interaction in employing humor and charisma to attract consumers for your brand in the forms of memes, witty advertisements, and the like.
3. Effective Print Design
Regardless of the rampancy of digital marketing, the use of traditional publication through newspapers, books, magazines, billboards, flyers, etc., is still very much thriving and can add significant additional points for your brand graphic design. This type of design combines carefully chosen typography with the accompaniment of artworks, illustrations, and photography. Because of the incorporation of different elements, the print must exude an overall seamless flow of information with exceptional layout and organization skills that pay attention even to the minutest details.
4. Sleek and Safe Packaging Design
This type of graphic design leans more towards the critical and practical side. One might say that packaging refers only to the safety and final touches of the product, but this speaks volumes about the brand’s ethicality and problem-solving skills. Businesses nowadays frequently use paper-based packaging instead of plastics and other non-biodegradable to let their customers advocate for environmental activism. Packaging, even more, seals the brand’s identity by using original and comprehensive design schemes and artwork and further reiterating the brand’s memo.
5. Environmental graphic design
With the new reality the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us, this aspect of brand design calls for alarming importance and priority. Connecting your consumers to places adds to consumer trust and positiveness towards your brand. Your retail design, office branding, and even event staging must encompass architectural factors, visual cues, landscaping, sanitization for your brand to emanate a safe and intact atmosphere. This reaffirms and interweaves all your other graphic design styles.
Recommended Tools
However, you cannot execute these graphic design styles properly without a reliable software. Here are the top 3 Graphic Design Tools you might want to use:
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Pixelixe
Are you running out of time and creative juices?
Don’t fret, as Pixelixe does the job for you by helping you and your team automatically create aesthetically pleasing graphics that will surely fit you and your audience’s tastes. This platform is essentially rich in 850,000+ stock photos, 700+icons, 900+ fonts, and pre-made templates, allowing you to generate unlimited versions of both software and your template to achieve a unique and apt design in minutes!
Since Pixelixe provides you with a customizable white-label experience, you can add your own brand’s logo, colors, and assets. You can also enjoy its other features, such as adding text, logos, captions, and quotes to images with point-and-click functionality tools and photo effects.
Suppose your business wishes to interact with its customers on its website and embed a fully customizable graphic or PDF editor. In that case, you can integrate Pixelixe on your existing site or app while still having complete control of your work. Its online banner maker helps even those with no graphic design experience develop professional-looking visuals for ads. To wrap up the package, unlimited storage allows graphic designers to create freely, export instantly in different formats (e.g. JPEG, PNG, PDF, or HTML), and even directly print the designs from your website.
Pixelixe offers a free trial with 50 documents and proceeds with corresponding plans for different features: Pixelixe Create at $9 per month, Pixelixe Automate at $49 per month, Pixelixe Scale at $99 per month, Pixelixe Enterprise at $249 per month.
2. Pixelied
With wanting to run away from mediocrity, Pixelied is perfect for graphic designers as this user-friendly software lets you create better-looking images with ease, providing you with enticing ready-made designs from 25+ formats and a wide range of access to tons of pictures, illustrations, and graphics that you need for your brand. Its flexible package of features includes an array of design editing tools such as background remover, templates for thumbnails and headers, and even product mockups which are adept for business purposes.
The features of Pixelied also allow graphic designers to keep up with the constant demand and change for brand design and advertising even up to a daily basis. Collaboration with your team and sharing strategies to different workspaces further enhances the software’s convenience and, ultimately, the brand’s overall quality output.
Although there is no free trial of the app provided, a free version grants you basic Pixelied features, three downloads per month, 5 BG credits per month, one workspace, and 1GB cloud storage. Meanwhile, the full version pricing starts at $9.95 per month or a one-time pay of $97.00, which is very reasonable for unlimited access to its features and even ensures you a 30-day money-back guarantee if ever you aren’t satisfied with its service.
3. DesignStripe
Simple and creative, DesignStripe is the go-to app for beginners in graphic design and users with limited editing experience. No design skills are needed for the software since it already provides you with a simple online editor yet a constantly growing library of illustrations and graphics that include a variety of versions of these objects. Smart sliders to adjust visuals and styles also grants quick tweaking of your design with no sweat.
For indecisive users at the onset of their graphic designing career, DesignStripe guides you through by providing you options such as debating between minimalist or complex designs by letting you freely add or remove objects while staying on course of your desired brand. Its easy-breezy features of different color palettes and variations of objects give you the freedom to decide and finetune your design that will perfectly fit your taste, altogether swapping them out or starting from scratch.
DesignStripe offers a free version with unlimited access to free styles, full scene customization, and downloads in PNG and JPG format. On the other hand, the full version has an early-bird price of $20 per month with unlimited access to all styles, full scene customization, and downloads in SVG, PNG, and JPG format.
Unfortunately, the collaborative team version is still under development as of November 2021, with the possible features of custom team assets, unified branding and colors, and multi-user support.
Takeaway
There is no right or wrong graphic design.
Although graphic design is a complex process that considers a lot of aspects in both communication and design, there are no strict guidelines for a graphic designer to follow. Brand advertising is growing with the market’s demands, thereby requiring continuous modification and revamping until both you and your consumers are satisfied. It is all in your hands to experiment and explore what feels best for your brand.
Author’s Bio:
Shelly Solis is a passionate writer with over a decade of freelancing experience. She is the CEO and co-founder of SaaSLaunchr, a digital marketing agency offering SaaS SEO, guest posting, and content marketing services.
