As a graphic designer, in Iasi - Romania, in the marketing team, there are quite a few things that I have to understand so I can make my job right. Also from my freelance experience and from what I learned from other people here are the 5 best key points of a marketing graphic designer:
- Think about who is the final consumer of the product that you are creating. What sort of people will read the brochure, flier or other piece of publicity you create and buy the product(s) or services that you promote? A clear description of your target audience will help you gauge what sort of feel your design should have. The look of your design should always reflect the preferences of the customer, not your own preferences or the preferences of your team mates or your customer (if you are a freelancer).
- The message without emotions is like milk without the bottle. The message you are trying to send is sustained by the emotions you create within the final customer. What emotions should you convey? What specific things should you draw the reader’s attention to? Read your client’s copy carefully. Use the message of the copy, especially the headlines, to inspire the message of your design.
- The message has to be reinforced by your design. Is your design consistent with the messages in the copy? Can you increase the impact of the copy message in your design approach? If you’re designing a brochure for some computer software, and the dominant marketing message seems to be that the software is "easy to use", your design should reflect clarity and freedom, maybe with lots of white space and clear copy sections. In short, don’t rely on your client to brief you properly on what the design should achieve. Take the initiative to work it out yourself.
- Emphasize the benefits of the product. Demonstrate how good the product is through your choice of visual. Show how the product makes a real difference to people’s lives. Reread through the copy and make a note of all examples of what the product does for the user. Then think about how you can demonstrate people benefiting from the product in your graphics and choices of photos.
- Represent visually the product or a concept of the service. Show people using the product/service. Show happy customers. Publicity that shows people is proven to be the most successful at driving sales. Good publicity should encourage readers to imagine themselves using the product to show people of the same demographic using the product! Get as many pictures of the product as possible, and work these pictures into your design.
There are other important things to take care when designing a new piece of publicity marketing materials. Please feel free to share with us your ideas
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Thanks for the great outline “5 Best Key Points of a Marketing Graphic Designer”.
I realize that your post can’t go into great detail about each aspect of marketing that you cover but allow me to take one of your points a little further.
In point four “Emphasize the Benefits” a beginning marketer may not understand exactly how this can be done briefly yet powerfully. Since brochures are typically small with severe space limititations you will want to cover the benefits using what are called bullet points.
Bullet points are a short statement revealing each benefit that a product provides.
Here is an example for a seminar covering the topic creating your own information product:
1. How to Create and Market Video DVDs
2. How to Find a Hungry Market for Your DVDs
3. How to Print and Produce DVDs for Less than $2 Apiece
Of course many more bullet points could be added to the list. But you get the idea. With the proper blending of images and text with a powerful list of benefit laden bullet points the brochues you create will work wonders and you will get repeat business for your graphic designing company.
Regards,
Mark
Good point Mark. Thank you for posting your remark.
As graphic designers today, our work in this visually charged world requires a balance of skills in the fields of art, science, education, intuitive and business in order to fully grasp the value of our clients’ offer and then transform that message into a realization that engages even a single customer. Enjoy the journey!
This is a great post that gets down to the basics. I think #3 is really important – your design and the copy should complement each other, not compete with each other. It seems like writers and designers waste time fighting about whose idea is better, instead of thinking about what’s best for the consumer. Think of how much time we could spend doing good work together if people would compromise instead of fight.
This is a phenomenal post with some tremendous points. I would like to add, if I may, to item #1: Thinking about the final consumer.
Many designers fail to fully understand the importance of this concept. They simply design brochures that fully meet the desires of the customer, but that do not adequately target the right consumers. Each brochure must be designed with the final consumer in mind. A perfect brochure aimed at the wrong consumers is worthless.
Sometimes, a designer will have to battle with the customer to generate a brochure that really serves the needs of the customer. Often, the customer does not fully understand what types of designs will best attract their target market, and the designer has to step in and do what is best.
Thank you for you appreciation. You have a great blog where I can find very good articles. I’ve subscribed to your feed
We have a big responsibility to educate our customer in the interest of the final consumer. It is one of the battles that indeed we have to fight