While many online businesses understand the importance of appealing website design, many cut costs on graphic design, believing that they can convince consumers with landing page copywriting. Some may try to whip up DIY brand logos, with amateurish results, turning off potential customers.
There are several very important reasons why graphic design matters so much for your business, which we’re going to highlight in this article. Although perhaps the biggest reason of all is simply brand awareness.
You can probably think off the top of your head at least 15 recognizable brand logos, and that should be enough to convince you of the power of graphic design and branding. So let’s examine why graphic design is so powerful.
Your brand impression in 50 milliseconds
Studies have shown that users form an opinion on your website in as little time as 50 milliseconds, and so by extension, that’s about how fast they’ll form an opinion on your brand. This means that your website and graphic design need to immediately capture your audience, and funnel them towards conversion.
According to Parachute, an agency focused on graphic design in Toronto, branding is the foundation of all the marketing you will create to promote your business or product for years to come. That’s not just a marketing line, here are some useful statistics on the relationship between branding and graphic design:
- Color improves brand recognition by up to 80%. (Forbes)
- 1/3 of the world’s top 100 brands include the color blue in their logos. (Design Buddy)
- Subconscious evaluations of a brand are 60% to 90% based on color (Emerald Group)
- 82% of investors want the companies they invest in to have a robust brand. (Pitchbook survey)
Consumers always judge a book by its cover
Great graphic design is really quite similar to book covers. There’s that old adage “you can’t judge a book by its cover”, but in reality, research shows that most people will quickly judge a front cover, then spend about 7 seconds reading the book description and blurbs on the back cover.
In fact, empirical research shows that this is the exact order most people consider a book’s elements when deciding whether or not to purchase:
- The title of the book
- The recommending source
- The book cover
- The book description
- The blurbs
- The customer reviews
- The author bio and picture (depending on where the picture is placed)
- The length of the book
- The book text itself (the “see inside” function online)
- The price
We can replace the word “book” with several website design terms, and the process for how people judge your website design would be nearly exactly the same.
Instead of “title of the book”, it would be your website header. “The book cover” is your brand logo and website header image, the book description and blurbs are your landing page content. In other words, books funnel customers towards purchase in nearly the exact same way that websites should.
Thus, if book covers and website graphic design are pretty much equal in terms of the conversion funnel, it may help to know exactly how book covers are chosen.
The short version of it is that it is nearly the same process as website graphic design, because a book’s cover is its branding. Everything is carefully chosen, from the imagery that reflects the book’s genre and tone, to the font and negative spacing used.
The point I’m trying to hammer is that you need to imagine your website as a book sitting on the shelf at a bookstore, and then you can truly grasp the importance of graphic design, and why it’s such a big deal for your business.