Branding is the emotions expressed through design!
A bad graphic design can absolutely kill your company branding and make your months of marketing efforts go in vain. Staying away from bad graphic design is a must if you want your branding to thrive in this competitive world.
Companies that invest in cheap design agencies usually have to suffer the hit on their branding due to poor designs. When you are paying a premium price to a legit design agency, they provide you with a dedicated team that will ensure you get the design that will make your brand reputation sky-high.
Design without thought is just decoration!
It is essential for a company to establish its brand identity among its target audience. Basically, brand identity is building a persona, the desired perception of a company in the consumers’ minds. It is only through the brand identity design that a company can clearly send the message across the board in a visual manner.
What Is Brand Identity Design?
Simply put, brand identity design is the graphic representation of a company’s identity. It is the tool that brands utilize to convey a positive message and promise to provide a pleasant experience online and offline.
Branding strategy utilizes a brand identity design to create a positive brand image of the company. A successful strategy will ensure that the brand is perceived by the prospects the way it wants to be.
It is a 5 step process that will promise dynamic growth to your company’s profile:
- Research and competitors analysis
- Planning effective brand strategy
- Brand Identity Design targeted towards the prospects
- Being consistent with the campaign across all the mediums
- Feedback, Campaign review and maintenance
What Does A Good Designer Do?
A cheap design agency, at best, will give you a generic-looking design incapable of creating an impact. On the other hand, a competent designer will provide you with stunning branding elements that will take your company to places.
Branding isn’t cheap; it takes a lot of time and fortune to get your company a set of marketing collateral designed in a way that can make it outshine the competitors. Companies that take branding as a trivial process will likely end up suffering due to a poor brand image.
These days customers have started to pay attention to the details; therefore, branding design should be to the point. Graphic design of your company – including marketing collaterals, packaging, and web design – is your first interaction with a consumer. A good designer will help you make an impression, making your prospects fall in love with your brand.
A good designer is your ticket to branding success!
Hiring a creative agency is not just a great step in the right direction; rather, it is a long process that will provide you with a stunning design experience.
A Taste Of Professionalism
As a professional marketer, it is quite obvious that you would like to deal with like-minded professional individuals who follow the same industry standards as you.
By hiring amateurs, you will sacrifice on this trait. On the contrary, a reputable design firm will provide you with professional behavior, along with the visual treat that will make you go WOW!
Dedicated Teams
Unlike a freelancer, agencies have dedicated teams for every task. As we have told you earlier, designing is not a single man’s show; instead, it is a team effort; you need people with different sets of skills to achieve a design worth looking at.
An individual who is a jack of all trades can’t match the quality of a team of professionals who ace their specific field of work. As they say, two heads are better than one.
Meeting The Deadlines
The biggest motivation in the agency world is deadlines. They will leave no stone unturned to meet the timeline.
Deadline: a line that a design agency does not cross!
The perk of hiring a responsible firm; you get what you pay for, and that too, on time. You might save a couple by hiring a cheap alternative, but you will be losing your peace of mind in return.
The 7 Deadly Graphic Design Sins To Avoid At All Costs
Brand success and design float on the same boat; if design sinks, the other one will follow.
Design is a longtime investment. You can’t change your branding every now and then. Besides, it can take up to months to complete a branding process.
Your branding should be on point, as perfect as it can be. The only way that will happen is if you avoid these silly mistakes:
#1. A Generic Looking Logo
A logo is a company’s stamp; make sure it leaves an
Impression!
A logo symbolizes your brand; it should be unique and tailored around your company vision. Usually, Startups compromise on their logo designs to save up some money but end up with a damaged brand image.
Companies with poor designs are perceived unreliable; no matter how well your service may be, if your design doesn’t appeal, your services won’t either. A generic looking logo will damage your brand identity, which might cause your company to shut down.
#2. Using A Badly Designed Logo
A poorly designed logo is even worse. A cheap-looking logo design is what a company gets after hiring a designer who charged it peanuts for a logo design; obviously, it lacks the brand identity design, hence cheap.
Your company might sell well and the sales chart may go unaffected, but you will never become a brand. A brand is not all about sales; it is also about a style statement that you can earn only by incorporating brand identity design to your marketing collaterals.
Design might not earn for you, but it will connect you with ones who can!
#3. Inconsistent Branding
Inconsistent branding makes your brand look bipolar
One of the basic requirements of decent branding is a common theme across all the creatives; this means that every asset needs to share a color scheme, fonts, and tone. This harmony helps create brand recognition.
Inconsistent themes in the design elements create an uneven personality of your brand, making it difficult for the brand to establish long term trust. When a brand delivers the same theme across all the mediums, it emits authority and reliance that helps build trust in a long term relationship with the consumers.
#4. Using Unnecessary Colors
Colors are like a soul to graphic design; however, adding too much color will make the design look haunted. Moreover, extra colors make the design look complex.
Ideally, the color palette of any brand shouldn’t exceed three colors; of course, there are exceptions. In fact, around 95% of the brands worldwide use only two colors in their logo, while only 5% have three colors.
No doubt, colors make a design look lively, but unnecessary shades will make the design look busy. On the other hand, it makes design too difficult to reproduce. Managing too many colors can become hectic, and brands may lose consistency in the designed elements.
#5. Messing Up The Fonts
Choosing the right kind of font for your design is also an art. The right kind of font adds an aura of appeal to your design. On the contrary, using unsuitable fonts will make your design look bad and unprofessional.
Following are the mistakes that are pretty common:
- Wrongly sized text, which makes it difficult to read.
- Too many typefaces used in a single design make it look busy and unattractive.
- Too much text, which destroys the entire composition of a design.
- Typos that will prove to be the last nail in the coffin of your brand image.
#6. Not Optimizing The Design For Digital
With the boom of digital, there are now tons of mediums where you can market your services. More mediums mean that a designer must optimize the design according to the medium it will be uploaded on. Otherwise:
- Your design will look unattractive
- Stretched or compressed
- Cutoff design elements – a blunder you don’t want to make
- Distorted images and colors – the quality degrades on certain mediums, therefore digital posts should be designed in accordance of the digital medium
Most of the time, similar content goes across all the mediums but it needs to be resized. Posting a distorted image is like a nightmare for a brand.
#7. Design Lacking Visuals
Visual hierarchy rules the digital world!
Too much text makes a design look busy, dull, and unreadable. In 2020, visuals are the way to go!
Our mind processes image 60,000 times faster than text. Not only are the visuals more appealing, but they also have a high recall. A design rich in visuals has a comparatively less reading time, and most importantly: it speaks for itself.
Wrapping Up
It all comes down to the design services you hire. You get what you pay for; always remember that. Professional designers will create a unique brand identity design that will boost your brand image and take your company to places.
In short, you only need to worry about the mistakes mentioned above if you are looking forward to hiring an amateur for your professional design work. Committed to stun you with eye-popping graphic design, creative agencies will never let you down.
We know good design agencies are expensive, but remember your brand image is priceless!
About the Author!
Tahha Ashraf is a Digital Brand Manager at Brand10x, a popular digital agency. He loves chipping in creativity and ideas that are worth execution. He loves to build brand persona and strategies that are poised to skyrocket the brand’s success. He writes and reads poetry in his free time.
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