How should you evaluate design concepts for a logo, website or brochure? As professionally executed, pretty pictures that appeal to you and your colleagues?
In order to be effective, a logo, website or brochure needs to fulfill one criterion. It must resonate with and compel your target market. If it does the same for you and your colleagues, consider that to be a bonus, not a performance indicator.
Here’s more on Design Intelligence, from the Canadian Marketing Association:
Fine art is focused on the visual experience — not the message. The message is often subtle or determined by the viewer. It belongs on living room walls and museums. Great marketing motivates and inspires action. Design intelligence starts with understanding the overall goal, the underlying challenge, the audience, human motivations and, maybe most of all, takes the designer out of the picture…
When in doubt, the way to assess whether or not a logo, website or brochure will work for your practice, is to consider whether or not it was driven by the unique requirements and motivations of your target market. Unless you are also your target market, that doesn’t mean you and the same applies to your colleagues and your designer.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing a logo, website or brochure design that appeals to you personally, with a design that could help you to build your practice by appealing to your target market.
Related articles: Winning in the Recession – Learn to Work With a Marketing Professional and
Target Market – Definition.