Marketing Tips - BeSmart

What makes great design?

I’m often confronted by design that a business has had created and they ask my opinion. Quite often it leaves me with a sinking feeling, not that I’m decrying other designers’ work but I feel I must help educate design buyers to understand what makes great design.

Design is about creating harmony and balance among the elements and having them come together in a final product that is outstanding. It’s not simply a case of throwing some images and copy on an advert or brochure. It’s so much more than that.

The designer/client relationship is a partnership and often this is not the case. By taking the time to choose the right agency and getting to know how each other work, you get so much more out of the relationship. Being thorough with your briefing and the agency being thorough in their questioning and research, the magic happens.

I want to help design buyers really understand what makes great design. It’s not a guide to help you to design yourself but how to get the best results from hiring a design agency to create the project for you. After all that is what they do, day in day out, for a wide variety of clients. It’s a guide to help you assess the design concept that is presented to you.

1. Do the ground work

You wouldn’t build a house without creating the foundations first; if you did it would fall down! The same goes for any of your marketing – think it through. What do you stand for? How do you do it differently than anyone else? Who is your ideal client, what is your message and then finally what channels will you use?

2. Stand out

In today’s message-heavy world it’s an absolute must to stand out or you’re wasting your money. By that I mean standing out with a great offer or proposition. Be different. Don’t just create something that everyone else is doing because you won’t stand out.

3. Work out your hierarchy of message

Your logo isn’t the message, so don’t have it at the top of the marketing piece as the main feature. The main feature should be the message/benefit you want to convey – the point you want to put across.

4. Appropriate typography?

Keep to a maximum of three typefaces and choose the typefaces to suit the message and the audience. For example, where you’re creating a message for your tenants to move them from traditional contact points to digital, choose a typeface that is friendly and non-threatening.

5. Lines and shapes

Lines are effectively used in separating or creating a space between other elements or to provide a central focus. The direction, weight, and character of the line can convey different states of emotions and can evoke various reactions.

Use shapes to add interest to your elements. Angular shapes indicate masculinity while velvety and curvy shapes like circles indicate femininity. Square shapes, elements, or designed items communicate security, trustworthiness, and stability. On the other hand, circles are like eye candy: They are organic, complete and communicate wholeness.

6. Alignment

When elements are aligned, they create a visual connection with each other that communicates a story. Alignment helps to put elements together in a visible and readable arrangement.

7. Choose the right imagery

Put the cook in the kitchen, so if your ideal client is an elderly person, don’t use images of a young person. Even more to the point try and avoid stock imagery – invest in good quality bespoke photography – besides probably seeing your image elsewhere, you really can tell it’s stock imagery!

8. Sets you apart in the mind of the audience

There are many companies in your field doing what you do – unless you’ve invented a time machine. The key is, does your design set you apart? Does it position you as credible and align with your values?

9. Adaptable

Often at the outset of your project and the briefing stage, the agency should be asking you how this project will be used. Will it need to be used elsewhere and will it work on social media for example? We recently designed an annual report which included a set of infographics that were to be used on social media so it was important to ensure they were easy to dissect and supply as individual images.

10. Instantly understandable

There’s no point making it difficult for your customer to understand what you are trying to say – make it easy for them. If they have to think too hard about it they will quickly move on.

11. Simple

‘Less is more’ and the most effective design pieces are those that are simple and uncomplicated. For example if you need a roller banner for an exhibition don’t try and put enough text for a brochure on it because people won’t read it. The roller banner is designed to give a snapshot of your business because it’s viewed from a distance.

Space is powerful when you want to deliver a direct message without the clutter of other design elements.

12. Contrast

You want your message to be conveyed to as many people as possible. Think about contrast of colours. Don’t for example allow yellow type on a red background as it will ‘jump’ and many people won’t even be able to read it, particularly those with visual impairment or the over 50s. Think about the contrast of certain colours and make your design piece as accessible to as many people as possible.

Contrast is also used to make elements stand out and grab attention. It creates a focal point in a design, creates visual excitement and increases the interest of any design creation. It can, for example, redirect the attention of a reader to a more important part or message of a presentation.

13. Colour

Colour affects the mood of the design. It represents different emotions and different personalities. The use of the colour red can incite anger, love, and passion or strong will. On the other hand, the colour blue, creates a sense of peace, serenity, and security.

Colour puts emphasis on the pertinent information that is conveyed by the other visual elements. It’s well worth checking out the psychology of colour that can easily be searched for on the internet.

14. Walk in their shoes

Imagine viewing the design concept from your ideal client’s point of view; look at it standing in their shoes – does it grab your attention? Does it provoke an action in you in some way?

15. Achieving the brief

Refer back to your agreed brief with the agency – does it work? Does it convey want you want it to convey?

Beware:

Don’t use Comic Sans or Brushscript – it’s so last century
Don’t use drop shadows – it’s so last century
Do I even need to mention clip art?

Does your design agency charge you author’s corrections?

Does your design agency charge you author’s corrections AKA author’s amends, client revisions or just client changes? What are your thoughts on it?

It can be a difficult conversation to have with clients but we’re as clear as possible at the start that the price we quote is subject to author’s corrections. We do this because we aren’t mind readers (how lovely that would be!) and can only quote on the information we have at the time.

In case you’re not sure what author’s corrections are, they are additional client changes that add extra time to a previously quoted project that we need to charge extra for at an hourly rate.

Having said that, we make allowances for small amends like image swaps and word changes but when it comes to project brief changes, pages being added or new copy having to be flowed in, that’s when we sweetly draw a line in the sand and shout up. We’ll always be as fair as possible, utilising any unused time first.

That’s why it’s difficult when we are asked to quote for ‘3 rounds of amends’. It’s like asking ‘how long’s a piece of string?’ Unless we have the amends at the time of quoting (unlikely) it’s nigh on impossible to correctly quote for 3 rounds of amends without either quoting too much so we lose the project or underquoting it and we’re out of pocket.

The answer? Give your design agency are very clear brief and approve your copy internally before giving it to us – that way you will save yourself money. We totally accept that once you see your copy in-situ, changes will be made but they’re not the massive budget-busting kind of changes that create tensions in relationships and end up in tears.

The relationship with your design agency is a two-way street and by working with them to understand their charging structure it will make for a much smoother and happier process all round.

I’d love to know what your experiences are, please let me know hello@besmartdesign.co.uk

Essential SEO Quick Check List

This is an article from our most recent newsletter.

Print this off, grab yourself a coffee and get all of these done at the weekend. Easy peasy, you can start ranking next week!

Page Titles:

Make sure your page titles are unique, don’t repeat words and are relevant to your business.

Bad titles:
Roof tiles, floor tiles, wall tiles
Tiles, ceramic tiles, square tiles, red tiles, blue tiles, plastic tiles, wall treatments, concrete render, wall render.

Google titles:
Wall, floor and roof tiles
Specialist car valeting in Birmingham

Tips:
Don’t put your company name on the end of every URL unless you separate it from the rest of the text with some kind of delimiter.

This is bad: Wall, floor and roof tiles Shiny Tile Company Ltd

This is good: Wall, floor and roof tiles : Shiny Tile Company Ltd

Although really, there’s no need to have your company name at the end anyway, and certainly never put it at the beginning.

Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions have no effect on ranking, but they are displayed in search results, so go through each page and make sure the descriptions are consise and enticing. They should be like an ‘elevator pitch’ and explain what the page is about in two short sentences.

Meta Keywords
If your page has lots of meta keywords stuffed in there, get rid of them. If you do want keywords in your page, then only have a maximum of maybe fifteen, but seriously, don’t bother with them. If in doubt, take them out, they’re not used for ranking at all.

Pretty URLs
If your page web addresses look like this: www.mywebsite.com/index.php?id=5 Then you need to take action. They should look like this: www.mywebsite.com/about-us or www.mywebsite.com/shop/cameras/nikon. The URL should describe the page you’re on because it aids with navigation and is also a big help to Google.

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are like the index to your website, they tell people and search engines where every single page is. Get your XML sitemap done and submit it to Google Search Console. Then, get an HTML sitemap generated. The HTML one is actually preferred by Google, so do that one first. Get one created here: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Image descriptions and ‘alt’ text
Make sure the ‘alt’ tag of your images is descriptive and only two or three words long. DO NOT stuff a ton of keywords in there expecting to rank, you won’t. In fact, you’re more likely to end up being knocked out of the search results completely.

Let us know how you get on, all of these tips are pretty easy to implement but if you need any help, give us a call on 01902 797970.

4 reasons NOT to make the logo bigger

I can’t tell you how many times over the years, we’ve poured blood sweat and tears into a project, only to get to the finished concept and that wonderful question comes along ‘one last thing, can we make the logo bigger?’

Tumbleweed rolls, the world stops… our world ends….

This happened again recently and it prompted me to write this post. I think this is possibly THE most dreaded question us designers dread!

So here’s 4 reasons NOT to make the logo bigger!

Your potential customer is not buying your organisation – they’re buying what you can do for them. In other words, they are not interested in seeing your logo bigger.
If your logo is great then as it is recognisable and memorable it’ll still be meaningful at a small size.
Your logo looks better with space around it – the space itself helps it to stand out.
It’s important to balance the scale of all the different design elements on whatever you’re designing. Enlarging your logo out of proportion with the rest of the design makes the whole thing look unbalanced and unprofessional. Hence why our world ends ….. ?

So there you have it. In the meantime here’s a great marketing parody on making the logo bigger from the key scene of “A few good men” with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.