Graphic design is an important piece of your overall marketing plan, but it’s highly misunderstood. Most marketers either put too much emphasis on it or not enough. But you should think of your graphic design as the support element for marketing collateral, not the main attraction. If your graphics overshadow your text then readers will lose interest.

One way to think of graphic design is to use a music analogy. You have a lead vocalist and you have backup vocalists, or accompanying vocalists. The lead vocalists plays the part of melody. That’s what the audience focuses on. But a musical act can often be enhanced by a harmonizing element as well. The harmony is what the backup vocalists do. Their job is not to attract the attention to themselves, but to maintain the focus on the melody by enhancing it with sounds that give the melody a different dimension. When done well you have a musical production that is beautiful and world class.

Your marketing graphics are the harmonizing element in your marketing collateral. They should not draw attention to themselves. Rather, they should enhance the main content and give it a new dimension so that readers will focus their attention where you want them to focus it – on the sales message.

A good graphic designers knows this. And if you hire the right graphic designer, she will sing the best harmony you’ve ever heard. If your copy is geared to sell, it will do just that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.