I’m at this point where I’m really trying to think of you, my audience. I’m really trying to place myself in your shoes. So, ideally, you stumble upon this blog because you’re a student and you’re thinking, “hey, graphic design–what’s that all about?” And I’m considering at which aspect of graphic design should I start? The basics, right? Should I spout out some terms and explanations or shove some pictures at you and say, “This–this is graphic design!” Well, I personally don’t think I should do that. So, I will back up just a tad. My last post I thought, we’ll just jump right into your first logo design, which really is an excellent suggestion. If you haven’t started making a design for a logo, start. The best way to learn design is to practice design. And each product of design, like a logo, really does have a purpose–this is the topic I really want to get to.
It’s true, graphic design is about being creative and clever. It’s about matching up fonts and creating appealing color schemes. It’s about layout, white space, and images. But, when you get down to the bone of all of what graphic design is, it’s really a way to solve problems.
Graphic design is implemented to solve a variety of problems, create unity, brands, advertisments, build up new companies, keep old ones from falling, sell tomatoes, books, sewing machines, decrease crime, pollution, poverty–the list goes on and it gets more bazaar. What it comes down to is that good graphic design influences people which solves problems.
Alright, lets go somewhere. In Marty Neumeier’s novel, The Brand Gap, he writes, “Execution–read creativity–is the most difficult part of the branding mix to control. It’s magic, not logic, that ignites passion in customers.” He says that it is emotional appeal that really convinces people to take action in most everything media related. Here are a couple other things he points out:
- “Our best thinking depends more on the “illogical”skills of intuition and insight, which may explain why logical argument rarely convinces anyone of anything important”
- “Benjamin Franklin, despite being a child of the Enlightnement, showed both intuition and insight when he observed: ‘Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason’.”
- “Innovation requires creativity, and creativity gives many business people a twitch. Anything new, by definition, is untried, and therefore unsafe. Yet when you ask executives where they expect to find their most sustainable competitive advantage, what do they answer? Innovation Because the truth is, innovation lies at the heart of both better design and better business.”
Here are a couple ads that I think effectively implement this idea of innovation to cleverly create emotional appeal to attract and convince an audience to solve problems for an organization. These examples may help solidify this concept of logic vs. emotion, and innovative quality design. Consider the messages here. What are these ads saying? And is what they say logical? Is it effective?
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