Denver Art Museum Graphic Design

Great graphic design grabs your customers' eyes, makes your business shine, and propels viewers to take action. That seems like it's simple, but yet a great many small businesses struggle with this. denver graphic design

From working with over 300 businesses and organizations around Denver and Colorado as graphic design clients, here is a selection of the most useful and straightforward techniques you can use to create impressive graphics for your company.

PLAN FIRST

Lots of entrepreneurs want to rush in and almost instantly get started with the design process. To succeed, a graphic designer must slow down. Expending half an hour at first to create the proper vision and strategy will save a lot more than 30 minutes in the revision process. If you don’t know exactly what your target is, it will be extremely difficult to produce the right end results on the first, second, or even the 3rd design concepts. So how does one build the best plan?

BEGIN WITH YOUR CURRENT STORY. denver graphic design services

Individuals latch onto story. Long ago when we sat around the campfire we entertained each other through stories. Today wespend hours in front of the TV to see more stories. Or maybe we’re we are more cultured and sit down with to read a story. Or we go out to the movie theater and watch a story on a bigger screen. We are hard wired to love, think through and most significantly remember stories.

So this is where your graphic design process should start. Decide what is the over-arching story at the heart of your brand. For Nike it is a story of all out exercise, told through images of sweating, determined athletes and the slogan of Just Do It. Every company will have a different story – what is yours?

THEN OUTLINE THIS CHAPTER

Your main brand story will be told in different chapters. Each piece of graphic design adds another chapter to this story. So what is the one piece of your message you want this advertisement, brochure, or packaging to tell? And what would be the most effective way to tell that chapter? Don’t open Photoshop yet! Just talk through what imagery, colors, and other visual elements would be most effective. Work through the pros and cons, and agree on one to three graphic design concepts before you start any actual design work. This one tip has saved us countless hours of design and saved many rounds of revisions for our clients around Denver, Colorado.

MOCK IT UP. FAST.

Your first round of designs is not the time to get everything perfect. (Ok, that might not be correct if you are a paid agency working as a graphic designer for your client. But if you are a business owner managing your internal team, this is 110% correct.) For your first round of designs you want to test the concepts you had decided on verbally. Get it quickly laid out so that you can see the big structural changes you want to make. This ensures that making these changes won’t meaning throwing out hours of detailed polishing work you had done on the graphics.

POLISH AFTER STRUCTURE IS FINAL.

Once you have settled on the big components of the graphic design, only then should you move on to polishing the design. Here are some key points to guide you during that process:

1) Colors control eyes and emotions. Start with your color selection to create the emotions you want as part of your story. Then put your color bursts where you want viewers’ eyes to be drawn.

2) People love people. Our eyes naturally gravitate to human faces, so use strong photos to grab attention.

3) Prompt action. Convey value, and then focus on action. If you have a multi-million dollar budget for a national brand awareness campaign, then ignore this advice. But if you are a small business like the ones we serve in Denver graphic design is a tool for your company to generate sales. So make an irresistible offer with a clear call to action that people can’t stand the thought of missing out on.

RECYCLE. Once you have great graphics, use them again and again. This creates a cohesive, unified brand identity for your company, and is a great way to keep your design expenses well within budget