How Do You Know Whether Your Graphic Designs are Working?

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could make all your graphic design ideas work effectively 100% of the time? Sadly, there is no such thing as a perfect design idea, and sometimes, even when a professional, high-quality infographic, image or social media template looks the part, there’s no guarantee that they will work every time.

It’s important to reflect on whether your business graphic designs are working well for you, and generating some form of return. How do you know whether they’re working, though? How can you tell whether they’re communicating well to your target audience?

There’s no magic formula for finding this information out, so you have to honestly assess how they’ve performed and think objectively about what could be done differently.

Reflecting on Your Graphic Design Quality

Just because you may have high-quality branding, custom logo designs and business graphics in your marketing, this doesn’t mean they’re working well.

What do we mean by working well? Reflecting on your designs can be subjective, and what constitutes ‘good’ can change depending on the purpose and type of design. Whether you’ve invested in social media design, leaflet or brochure design, digital materials, or anything else, graphic designs are created to communicate a message to your customers.

Visually speaking, creative design ideas often spark interest and engage your audience, but these alone won’t cement these designs as 100% effective. This is why it’s important to understand elements of visual communication and reflect on your past designs as objectively as possible.

To know whether your design ideas are working, you should judge your designs based on whether they achieve specific targets rather than personal preferences. With this in mind, here are a few questions to ask yourself when reflecting on your designs.

Does the Graphic Design Fulfil its Purpose?

If you’ve invested in brand logo design, reflect on whether it represents your name and what you do. If you’ve invested in website graphics or landing page designs, and you’re trying to persuade users to convert or sign up to an email list, check on whether your numbers have been successful. Your designs need to present relevant information to communicate your key message, educate your audience and not overwhelm them with too much information.

Has the Graphic Design Contributed to Winning New Business?

If any of your business graphics, logos or marketing materials have contributed to any new business won, that’s excellent! But use this time to reflect how well that’s worked and what could be improved, if anything. Eye-catching and engaging design ideas designed to attract new customers should be pushing them further down your sales funnel. If not, ask yourself why.

Is the Graphic Design Message Easy to Understand?

A professional graphic designer will create easily readable designs, with key focal points, such as heavier headlines, infographics, typography and so on. An excellent design will make good use of visual hierarchy, guiding your audience through the design elements in order of importance, with easy-to-read design text. Do your designs lack in these areas? Sometimes it’s a case of trying to explain complex services in designs with too much text.

Is the Graphic Design Style Audience-Appropriate?

Remember, you’re not designing for yourself; you’re designing for your customers. Your target audience will have certain expectations for how visual graphics should look, and your designs have to match your business branding and reflect what you do, in terms of tone, colour and aesthetics.

Does the Graphic Design Reflect Your Business Now?

If you have had to make structural or organisational changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, like many businesses, you’ll have to communicate these changes to your audience.

Design is a tremendously effective way to do this, such as explaining new services added, describing changes to how you deliver services and so on. If your old graphic or digital designs are outdated, you may need to rethink your design approach.

Business design is a collaborative effort between you and your graphic design agency. By collaborating with our client Canine Assisted Learning (in Crowthorne, Berkshire), the team at Abstract Creative Studio were able to drive them ahead of their competition with engaging, visually eye-catching graphics that reflect their brand. This includes website graphics, social media graphics and many other types of design ideas.

Brand Review Meeting with a Graphic Design Agency in Hampshire

As we’re closing in on a new year, why not take this opportunity to book a free brand review with the Abstract Creative Studio team? We’ll be happy to have a no-obligation chat about your brand design, including your business logos, social media and other marketing collateral, and see how our professionally-designed, customer-focused graphics can help to prepare you for 2022.

To arrange a free 45-minute brand consultation, fill in our contact form.