Like we say, design starts with you, your business. Before you dive into any design process, it’s important to establish who / what your brand is. This is important because every piece of design or communication beyond logo design should be inline with your brand.
A big contributor to knowing your businesses design needs, is knowing the vision for your business. For example, you own a company that leases out construction equipment. Your vision is to become the number one provider in Australia because of your incredibly down to earth customer service, and eco-friendly values around machine manufacturing. To achieve this you’ll need to know who your client is, where they spend their time, how you can reach them.
In order to know what you’re going to design, you need to establish who you’re going to be communicating and servicing to. Let’s say your construction equipment company has branded themselves on their incredibly down to earth customer service, and eco-friendly values. This has lead to project managers reaching out to hire equipment to level and build their new 20 acre hydroponic farm, or Australia’s newest and biggest green energy farm. Whatever the project may be, you want more clients like this, and need to know where to find them.
At this point you’re probably going to have your brand identity design work done. This does not start and finish with a logo. As we’ve established there is so much more that feeds into your brand. As for the visual representation of your brand you’re going to be looking at a few essentials:
- Logo & Logo Type
- Style Guide / Colour Scheme
- Language Guide / Tone
- Business Cards
- Email Signatures
Before diving into collateral, you need to know where your potential clients spend their time. You’ll know their behaviour the more you develop your client or customer profile.
Let’s go over our eco-friend machinery lessor… Say their audience spends their time reading gardening and eco-home blogs, they may want to sign up to an email list that send them useful information about reducing your footprint, or perhaps their afternoons engaging with friends and family on Facebook and Instagram. In this case, this business would want to gain marketing collateral for an email campaign, ad banners to appear on third party blogs, and ad templates for Facebook and Instagram in order to connect with them on the platforms where they spend their time.
As you gain more of an understanding as to where you’ll be able to reach your customer, you’ll know the type of graphic design work you’ll need done to help your reach your business vision, beyond logo design.
