Graphic Design: Know Thy Audience! July 21, 2009, by Chris Pelicano, Peter Mirus in Design
If you are a company that utilizes graphic design in any way to speak to your customers, you need to know who they are so that you can produce design pieces that speak to that constituency, or the individual segments within that constituency, personally.
Knowledge of your audience is of particular importance if you are a small company with a tight budget, and can only use a single sign approach to your customer base.
Let me use a food analogy here. You run a restaurant, and you serve only one dish per evening – the same dish to the entire restaurant. Which dish do you choose? If 75% of the crowd is a “meat and potatoes” type of audience and you serve them a Thai dish -- spring vegetables with fried bean curd in a spicy black bean sauce, with seaweed and diced chicken soup on the side – you may have lost 75% of your constituency before the first bite.
In graphic design, you can’t please everyone – tastes differ radically. But if you have only one shot, you darn well better know what imagery, language, and design style will be appreciated by the majority of your audience. If you don’t provide that kind of information to your designer, you run the risk (but not the certain result—in fact, less so if you have a good designer) of getting mediocre results out of your design pieces.
Involve your designer as a strategic partner! A single designer may service many different industries, designing for a wide range of audiences. Good designers are tuned into the world of taste and the intangibles that attract attention and move behavior. Put their experience to work for you.
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