Context
Do get the context and target audience right
It is vital that your ideas & design style is appropriate
to the target audience you are aiming for, if you get this aspect
wrong then you'll risk alienating a large proportion of potential
customers as well as wasting a heck of a lot of time, effort and
money. It's no good trying to reach an older audience with a cartoon-style
fast animation, neither can you reach a younger audience with
a conservative, more reserved approach
It's almost impossible to reach all levels of consumer consciousness
because what one person finds amusing another will find incredibly
irritating, what one person may find stylish and sophisticated,
another will find boring and stagnant. So you have to aim your
project at who you would most likely respond in a positive manner,
rather than trying desperately to appeal to all of the people
all of the time
The best way of finding out what works and what does not is testing.
Test, test and test again. And when you're done testing, test
some more. It is the only surefire way of knowing whether your
wonderful idea is a hit or a miss with the public. And they are
a fickle lot - what they pick up one week, they'll drop the next
Listen to people's reactions and be prepared to make changes,
even if sometimes they are changes you'd rather not wish to undertake
at the risk of losing artistic integrity. Something that is highly
artistic, may not necessarily be something that gets through to
the right people commercially
It is a fine balancing act and experience is really the best
indicator in knowing what truly works and what doesn't. And even
then, some of the big boys who really should know what they're
doing occasionally get it wrong. There are plenty of cases of
that happening !
Think : Who should your design be aimed at and how will they
react to your ideas ?
Communication
Do communicate a simple message, clearly and
effectively
The art to triggering the desired response from your target group
of people is to try and focus on one idea at a time in any given
media. Avoid cramming everything into 1 piece as this can appear
confusing and put people off. The attention span of the human
mind in getting people interested in what you have to say is pretty
short and if you don't grab them straight away, they'll quickly
get bored and move elsewhere. This is the main reason why graphic
design in business is so important. If you don't grab people's
attention, someone else will
As well as trying to stay focused on one unique selling point
at a time, it is important to use the right language and communicate
effectively. Classically, the advertising industry tends to categorize
target audiences by what kind of newspaper they might read. The
kinds of people who may read the Sun tend to be quite different
from those who read the Daily Mail and those who read the Daily
Mail are usually quite different to those who may read the Telegraph
etc
Using clear, plain, jargon-free English is almost always always
the best philosophy to adopt when copy writing for a design-based
campaign. We hope you find the Chameleon website clear and easy
to understand. This is because the kinds of people we'd like to
work with would ideally be those who agree that information should
be clear and easy to understand
Why use a paragraph of long business buzz words when a single
line will do ?
Keep it simple
Do keep your design ideas & layouts simple
Do let your work breathe
Along with keeping your main idea simple, it is also a good idea
to keep your overall design layouts simple as well. Resist the
temptation to add unnecessary clutter to or around your design.
Simple layouts communicate a simple message the most effectively.
Cluttered, messy layout do not. Simple eh ?
Some of the worst examples of messy DIY slap-dash design work
can usually be found in your handy local telephone directory.
To test this theory - why not grab a telephone directory now and
flick through a few pages looking at the adverts shown ?
The larger national & international companies with enough
money to spend on professional design agencies to create their
adverts will usually have a pretty good job done - their adds
will be clean, clear, sophisticated, intelligent, stylish, uncramped
and often humorous. Typically, examples of well laid out design
work can usually be found in the Insurance and Banking sections
of local telephone directories
Examples of quite hideous design efforts created by smaller,
more local companies can usually be found in directory sections
such as Builders, Decorators and Plumbers. Although not all
ads shown in these sections will be bad in terms of design &
layout, it's a fair bet to say that most will probably be fairly
horrific. This is usually because smaller firms either do not
have sufficient resources to fund a design campaign or question
why they should need to pay someone else to do a job they could
probably do themselves. Big mistake indeed
Without the proper design training, DIY jobs look awful. Good
layouts need to breathe. They need space around them and a well
thought out structure so that all the various graphic elements
align beautifully and do not clash
Those who do not know what they are doing will often adopt the
philosophy of "I'm paying a lot of money for the advertisement
space, so I need to stuff as much information into every last
square millimeter that I can... If there's a space - fill it !"
Don't do this. Instead, let your designs breathe with enough
blank space surrounding the main aspects (commonly known in the
design industry as white space) In fact, this principal should
apply to all your design work both now and for the future
At Chameleon we spend a considerable amount of time creating
sketches and initial layouts for our projects - both simple and
sometimes a little more complicated. When looking back, it has
always been the simplest layouts that have worked the best and
often it is good to know when you have added too much. So, step
back and reconsider : "..do I really need to include this
bit here in my work ?". Do this for every design element
in your piece and you won't go far wrong
Clutter is not needed and only ever adds random confusion to
an otherwise aesthetically pleasing layout
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