It almost seems with every new day comes a new channel of communication. For businesses, finding a way to go with the flow rather than staying stagnant is a constant challenge of reinvention and growth.
This blog will look at the importance of considering the medium when developing your graphic design strategy.
Understanding The Medium’s Strengths and Weaknesses
Every medium has a range of positives and negatives associated with its use. If that alone wasn’t complicated enough, in the most part, they are constantly changing. Once you know the medium’s particular weaknesses you can ensure your graphic design doesn’t fall into its pitfalls.
For example, a design that relies heavily on colour and detail may not suit the newspaper medium with relatively low picture quality. Again, you wouldn’t pack a lot of text onto a billboard, which only has the audience’s attention for seconds at a time. However, informative text-based designs suit newspapers well and bright simple graphics are perfect for a billboard.
Understanding Your Audience
Along with the medium’s physical strengths and weaknesses, it’s important to note the audience it captures and ensure it aligns with your target market. Audience capture within traditional media has become relatively clear over time however with the rise of digital marketing it tends to be less obvious where and when your target audience is consuming information online. As a result many businesses are not putting in the proper research and are spending valuable revenue on mediums and strategies that are not necessarily suited to their needs.
The digital medium offers a massive range of benefits from a graphic design sense including interaction-based advertising, integrated audio and measurable results along with targeted distribution to name just a few. If your target market is heavily digital-orientated then it is critical that your graphic elements are suited or at least adaptable to this medium and maximise the growing potential of digital marketing.
Be Adaptable
As technology changes, along with audience behaviour, it is more important than ever to stay adaptable. Don’t become attached to any one medium or design. If you can remain mobile as a brand and adaptable you will be best placed to change with your audience. This is often easier said than done as adaptation requires investment in both time and revenue, however staying stagnant will undoubtedly be more expensive in the long run.
If you can properly understand what you are doing and why, you will be best placed to ensure your graphic designs will be suited to not only the medium but also your business goal.
For more information regarding available mediums and their individual requirements speak to a Kwik Kopy professional today.
