How To Apply Communication Design Principles to Enhance Education Marketing Strategy
Communication design is an area that uses design ideas to connect with people. The approach involves packaging the marketing messages in a graphic form to ensure better engagement with the target group. Apart from the communication aesthetics, design communication is also about choosing the right communication media to ensure the message reaches the relevant target audience.
Communication design combines all important pieces of information effectively in a pictorial form to get the best campaign outcome. The discipline focuses on crafting impactful messages through creative interaction between words and illustration.
Important Design Principles to Enhance Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
There are many universal tenets of communication design that can be applied to your marketing strategy for creating effective and impactful compositions.
Some of the fundamental principles of design communication include evenness, variety, proportion, harmony, rhythm, movement and flow etc. These design concepts fall under the basic principles of infographics and are being widely used by marketers.
Let’s understand the application of these design concepts in detail.
Evenness
Objects in a design composition (both visual and text) should be evenly arranged around vertical and horizontal axis to provide better visual balance. Balance can also be achieved when objects are arranged unevenly in the creative copy by giving more visual weight to one side or element in the composition.
Variety
Variety refers to how differently visual elements are placed in a composition. Variety can be easily established using design elements like colour, white space, font size and texture. These elements can help design same message in a different way.
Variety can also be created through varying degrees of emphasis within a composition. You just need to identify the primary, secondary and tertiary objects that should be given the most visual weight in the composition.
Movement and Flow
Movement is the flow of visual trajectory that a viewer follows while viewing a communication composition. With proper flow of objects, a composition can create an appealing narrative to the viewer and provide better visual experience. Comprehensive movement can be established using design elements like lines, shapes, and colours etc.
Proportion
Proportion in a composition is achieved by balancing out various design elements and their relationship with each other. Varying sizes of design objects can help create a focal point or movement along the composition.
Harmony and Rhythm
Visual harmony is an important tenet of communication design. The individual parts within the whole composition should be in agreement with the overall creative copy to provide rhythm.
Optimal use of white space also helps in creating harmony and balance. Avoid repetition by overusing objects. Maintain meaningful proximity between text and graphics to avoid interruptions.
Although the principles of communication design remain unchanged universally, they differ in application and practice within the marketing community.
Define Objective and Type of Content
What is the type of your content design? Is it a social media post, web content, emailer or an ebook. All such content types are different pieces of information and hence their purpose will also differ.
Before applying your creative skills on a design template, be clear on the objectives to achieve through that content. This can help in effective alignment of your communication design with overall marketing goals.
Follow a Style Guide
Do not forget to follow your institute’s brand style guide which tells how to use colors, fonts and other design elements in a composition. On the basis of the style guide you can decide what type of creative copy you are going to create.
Section off your text and imagery so that the viewer can digest the communication message easily.
Keep it Simple and Short
Your communication design should be crisp and easy to comprehend. It must have a strong visual appeal to generate high impressions in less time. After seeing the creative your target audience will decide in a fraction of a second whether to engage or ignore. So keep the composition as simple yet attractive as you can.
Consistency
This is perhaps the most important aspect in design communication. Be consistent in designing creatives. It should reflect on every marketing collateral.
Your content elements such as font type and size, spacing, colour combinations, etc. used on different marketing properties across media channels should adhere to standardization practices as per your institute’s guidelines.
Design for Your Audience
Whether you are designing an emailer or a social media post, always adapt to the perspective of the end user. Why would someone see your post? What call to action it should trigger? What do you wish to communicate? It’s important to incorporate all these aspects in your design element.
Do a little bit of consumer research to understand your audience preferences and choices. It will help prevent common communication mistakes before they happen and let you craft best creative designs to engage audience.
Design for the Platform: Mobile Friendly Designs
Don’t neglect the channels where your communication design ad will be shown. Follow upcoming trends in designing ad copies on digital platforms.
Responsive designs will help users to easily navigate through your composition on mobile phones with the same look and feel of the desktop version. The design elements are convenient to recognize in a responsive design on a desktop, tablets and various types of smartphones.
The most important information on a composition should always be placed either on the top or central axis so that the viewer can see it right away and doesn’t miss it.
In the case of social media ad designs, less is often more. Do not clutter your composition with lot of information. Less cluttered communication designs are easier to read, navigate, and digest. Use white space around your content efficiently so that the reader can focus more on reading and understanding your content.
Use Colour Psychology
Colour influences people emotions and perceptions. These effects however differ between people across different gender, age, and culture.
Color psychology is widely used in marketing and branding. As an important design element, colour plays a big role in communication designs. Research shows that certain colours can encourage us to do certain things, such as click a button or continue on to the next page of a web form. Similarly, you can design all of your CTAs in bold colour to help them stand out and drive conversions.
It’s Time to Communicate with Smart Design Elements
One of the essentials to effective communication is design. Good communication design breaks through the media clutter and connects convincingly with readers and viewers. It helps to achieve the creative transition between words and pictures for building compelling stories around your campaign.
Smart marketers here need to understand that by using attractive visuals, simple marketing messages can be created to influence purchase decisions and generate brand affinity.
So get up and help your graphic design team to create compositions that speak beyond words and build powerful brand imagery in the minds of your target audience.
