Design goes way beyond your brand. Even beyond your website.
Design is in the way you set up your office and set up your storefront. It’s
the way you plan meetings and PowerPoint presentations. Good design has a
profound effect on the way we run our businesses—heck, on the way we live our
lives—every day. Your customers interact with your design, and the way they do
it can tell you something.
A Pretty Picture
Your customers connect to your design. They get something
out of it, some kind of feeling. Your logo might remind a customer of a fishing
trip they took with his father when he was a child, or it might remind her of
her first car. It might even be as simple as invoking some kind of
recollection. But in any case, your brand is going to bring up some kind of
image in your customer’s mind. If there’s no end result to your design, then in
the end, it’s just a pretty picture.
There’s nothing wrong with a pretty picture, mind you. It’s
just that it’s not expected to do much for you. You can hang a pretty picture
on your refrigerator, but it won’t help you manage a diet. The same goes for
your brand. If it’s just a pretty picture that doesn’t evoke anything from your
customers, is it really helping you much?
The Rest of the Story
Setting out to design something that you know will make your
customers feel something isn’t easy.
In fact, it’s probably not even the best way to go about it. You can’t guess
the way that someone will feel when he or she interacts with your design. Your
best bet is to create your design in such a way that it tells your story. You
have a story for why you’re in business, why you’re doing what you do. Use your
design to help tell that story. If your story has an emotional element, using
design to convey it will help you reach your customers on an emotional level.
Even if it doesn’t, a well-designed story can still cause a reaction in people.
We aren’t advocating for a picture book (though there’s nothing wrong with
those). Good design should tell a story—in this case, yours.
To Do List
Not only do you want your customers to feel some kind of
emotion when they see your design, you also want them to do something. Walk in
the store. Pick up the phone. Hop on one leg. It could be anything (that last
one may not be easy, but hey, everyone likes a challenge). Even some stores are
set up to make people immediately move in one direction without realizing it.
The next thing they know, they’ve already walked around the entire store and
seen everything the store has to offer. Good design can make incredible things
happen. What do you want your customers to do?
