Don’t Forget the Customer’s Input
What kind of environment are you in when you start up your graphic design work? Whenever I need to do a creative project like that I’m usually alone with a program like CorelDraw up. I’m not next to the people I’m actually designing for. All I have is myself to get input from, and often it’s easy to forget that I’m not actually designing advertising for myself, but for the customers.
But you aren’t actually designing anything for yourself. That postcard design is meant to appeal to someone else, and if you forget it you might end up designing something the people it was aimed at have no interest in seeing.
So what exactly can you do? Invite a bunch of your potential customers up to give you input?
Not literally, no, but there are other ways to get advice from those you’re attempting to appeal to.
The way you do it is by looking at what they’ve liked in the past. If you’ve already sent out color flyers before to them and been successful figure out what about those designs worked and try to repeat it. If you haven’t sent out anything in that particular form of advertising, try to find some competition who has, and see how that worked out.
Unless you happen to be in a very new business without much of any history behind it, you should have plenty of past examples to look to in order to figure out what you should do right now. Odds are very good you’ll find a brochure design that hit just the right note with your customers that you can look to in order to get some inspiration.
After all, each industry is going to have its own unique styles of graphic design that appeal more to their customers. I doubt you would have to look very far to find a few good examples of them.
Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever try something new, or see if people are interested in something a little different from what they’ve seen before, but you really have to know what they have liked before if you want to have any kind of success.
Trying something new doesn’t mean you ignore everything else and just go for it. Research is still important and will still help guide you to a much better looking advertisement.
Sure, you might not literally have all those customers in that room with you helping you figure out what to do next, and I think if you did it would probably be a lot harder rather than easier to get your work accomplished. But the next time you get stuck, or you just aren’t sure what people are going to like, all you need to do is take a look at the past to help you figure out the future.
