Graphic Design Ideas: Finding a Source of Inspiration

Business owners often struggle to keep on top of everything at times. It’s no surprise - balancing all of the various customer deadlines and expectations along with managing staff, overheads, bookkeeping, and the hundreds of other responsibilities any business owners have is a challenge! Along with the added responsibility of marketing your brand, it’s no wonder it can all feel overwhelming.

Your marketing strategy impacts how you draw customers into your business. They’re the lifeblood of your company, so you cannot afford to ignore your marketing. Being busy is great, but marketing your brand is one of the most important duties you have as a business owner, and it’s a responsibility you have to deal with constantly.

Narrowing Down Your Graphic Design Ideas

The good news is that great marketing comes from excellent inspiration. Abstract Creative Studio are a graphic and branding agency with experience helping business owners achieve their marketing goals with consistent, professional and transferable graphics. This short guide is here to help you if you’re trying to find the right creative direction for your brand’s marketing through graphic design.

It’s not easy to deliver creativity whenever you want to, and everyone has a different way of getting those creative juices flowing. Once you ignite that first creative spark, you’ll then be closer to creating customer-focused, well-designed graphics.

It’s important to savour moments when you’re feeling creative, but ultimately, you need to be disciplined in what you want to achieve out of your business graphics. Think about your greater marketing goals rather than a single logo, social media or business card design idea. Once you start thinking about these targets, the consistent, customer-focused, bright design ideas will start flowing more freely.

Why Do I Need Graphic Design?

Each graphic design idea you have needs to serve a purpose, so you should ask yourself the below questions as a guide.

• Who are you trying to target? Who is your ideal customer?
• How would you define your brand? By extension, what current style guide or restrictions do you have to abide by, if at all?
• What goal do you need to reach with your graphics? Do you want to drive people to your site, get them to call, fill in a form, etc.?
• What is your messaging going to be? How are you delivering it?
• What platform will these be promoted on? Will they be printed or digital?

Answering the above questions will streamline your creative process by setting a structure you can follow. From then, if you don’t have the skills to produce the designs yourself, a graphic design agency can then come up with initial concepts and designs based on your brief. This whole process will be far less time-consuming and stressful, allowing you the freedom to focus on your other hundreds of business owner duties as mentioned above!

If you need help finding that crucial element of CONSISTENCY in your marketing, you’re in the right place to find designs that align with your brand, vision, values and overall strategy. One call to Abstract Creative Studio can help you explore these ideas.

4 Ideas to Inspire Your Design Vision

1. See what your competitors are doing - as much as taking inspiration from your competitors is good, it’s crucial to stand out from your competition, so you shouldn’t mimic exactly what they do. Instead, form a general picture of what works for them and leverage that with your unique selling proposition (USP) and target audience.

2. Look at social media and print - image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are goldmines for good (and bad) graphic design ideas, as are printed leaflets, magazines, flyers and brochures. Some initial research goes a long way in picking the most eye-catching and effective logo designs, blog graphics, icons and much more. So, thinking like your customers, what would stand out most to them?

3. Build up a collection - gather all your favourite examples and begin a structured process of shortlisting them. Perhaps list out some pros and cons of each one, revisit them and reassess with a fresh pair of eyes. Again, think about which design ideas you can consistently promote to your customers to good effect.

4. Talk to a creative - some business owners feel that what they lack in creativity, they make up for in entrepreneurship. In reality, everyone is creative on some level, but to help with inspiration, talk to graphic designers, copywriters, photographers, marketing strategists, videographers and other fellow creatives that you know for an honest opinion. They do this for a living, so their professional views can help significantly.

Get Help from a Customer-Focused Graphic Design Agency

Are you still not sure where to begin with exploring your graphic design concepts? If you’re looking for graphic designers that design with your customers in mind, and do so consistently, give Abstract Creative Studio a call. Whether you need a one-off project or a series of designs in multiple formats, we’re here to help.