In the early growth stages, businesses might overlook the importance of standardizing their design elements, given the manageable number of brand design assets. However, as businesses grow, standardization turns into a necessity. The uniformity of design elements becomes a critical factor in successful branding. Even though designers crave creative freedom, they also appreciate clear brand guidelines. However, these rules shouldn’t be overly rigid to avoid confusing the audience.
In today’s era, the boundary between physical and digital design elements is becoming increasingly indistinct. Moreover, businesses are now dealing with a discerning audience that can easily recognize brands based on their design efforts. Given this context, it’s essential to standardize designs and their creation processes. This blog post will highlight three key advantages of design standardization for brands.
A graphic design as simple as a logo is also a work of art that takes hours to bring out the final output. There are a lot of decisions that go into it. From several sittings of brainstorming and sketching to several revision attempts, the money that goes into creating a graphic design as simple as a logo is also not that small.
If you are from the design industry, you would already be aware of the City of Melbourne logo, if not, you will be surprised to know that back in 2009, it cost the council of Melbourne around $91,000 only for the research for rebranding, while the design itself cost up to $148,000. So, designs are time-consuming, and a lot more serious decisions go into their making.
Here, standardization plays a huge role. When a company standardizes its design elements, the designers get a direction on how to complete the project. Often in many big companies, multiple designers are working on the same project. Even if one makes a color scheme mistake on an important brand digital or physical asset and then publishes it, it will cause inconsistency leading to difficulty in garnering viewers’ attention or creating brand recognition.
Imagine, why for more than 130 years, the Coca-Cola logo hasn’t changed really, cause a strong brand understands the value of a logo and repeatedly showcases it. Yes, coca-cola has made some major tweaks to its logo, but they have persistently kept the color, look, and feel it.
Standardisation decisions can be made on typography, color scheme, layouts and grids, spacing, and margins, shapes and lines, visual hierarchy, and a lot more.
Like in the fashion industry, the fad keeps changing in the graphic design sector as well. But should a designer working for a business should follow the trends blindly or should know the spirit of the business before adopting them and experimenting with them? If your Google epic logo fails, you will find umpteen of them out there.
For instance, the London Olympics Logo must be the first Olympics logo that received so much contempt. 48,000 UK citizens signed a petition to scrap the logo because they believed that it didn’t represent London from any angle. So to minimize the design risks, it is always better to standardize the designing process.
Standardisation definitely will help businesses make their design outcomes more predictable. Wouldn’t it have been better, if the London Olympics logo was designed after knowing the pulse of the people before rolling it out?
A predictable great experience is what every customer would want with every interaction that they make with the brand they love. Design standardization plays a great role in garnering customer loyalty on a faster note.
For instance, if you are an Apple product lover, every time that you see a sleek monochromatic emblem of an apple with a bite taken out of it, you expect the same level of customer experience, satisfaction, and assurance of great quality. Whether you are buying an iPad, iPod, iPhone, or any Apple product, you expect the same happiness of purchase. This is exactly why designs need to be standardized.
A standardized logo or any design element for that matter will create an emotional connection if used well. This emotional connection is ever more important when most leads come through the internet and social media these days. To breed more customer engagement and in turn, get customer loyalty, it takes immense effort.
Design standardization isn’t just about creating a consistent visual identity, it also impacts the customer’s journey with the brand. For example, a company might standardize the layout of its physical or online stores to make navigation easier for customers.
This reduces the cognitive load on the customer, making their shopping experience more enjoyable and less stressful. It also makes the brand more accessible to new customers who can quickly understand how to interact with it. Furthermore, a standardized design can also communicate the brand’s values and philosophy. For example, a brand promoting sustainability might use recycled materials in their product packaging. This not only conveys their commitment to the environment but also makes the customers feel good about supporting such a brand. Thus, design standardization can be a powerful tool to enhance the customer experience and promote brand loyalty.
So, if you are new to the business world or are thorough with the design principles over your extensive work experience in the business world, you should have a clear-cut design process in place. More than saying yes to design standardization, it will save you time and money.
