5 Ways our Graphic Design should reflect your Target Audience
#BlogArticles
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Color
When choosing a color for your logo, brand or product, consider your target audience. Certain colors will appeal to certain audiences. In choosing a color, you want to consider what emotional response you are hoping your audience to have when seeing or thinking about your product or service. Your want your chosen color to represent the mood or feeling of your product. A company targeted at women 20-50 would enable the use of colors such as pastels and feminine colors that employ soft and warm feelings. These colors would not create the same appeal if used on a very masculine website, such as a car dealership or kickboxing site. These audiences would prefer more masculine colors such as reds, greens or blues. Picking your colors based on color psychology is wise, as different colors will evoke different feelings in your audience.
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Imagery
You MUST consider your target audience when choosing images for your website, flyer or any other promotional piece. Your images are reflective of your product, but they must emotionally appeal to your target. Let’s take for instance a website we work on, SOS Safety Magazine (link to). Our main target audience is youth age 12-18, as well as teachers and other professions who may engage with the youth regularly. A younger audience is attracted to more colorful and animated designs. Our designs on this website and magazine are fun and youthful that appeal to that age range. This imagery is chosen and appropriate because of our audience. The same imagery would not be suitable on a corporate brochure for a product such as lawn care, where the target audience is home owners. The imagery in this case would be more earthy and reflective of the product. Your target audience will gauge the treatment of imagery in your graphic design. Your images are used to create an emotional response from your viewers – choose your pictures wisely!
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Interaction
How your target audience engages with your graphic design piece is incredibly important to how it is designed – and more specifically WHO will be interacting with your graphic design is incredibly important. For instance, you may place a QR code on your promo piece if you are targeting an audience that is tech savvy and knows what that little white box with black square dots on it does. However if your audience is from an elder generation, and would have no idea what that is, then perhaps a different approach would be better. If you are targeting small businesses to use your service, you may consider an email blast with call to action’s to your website because you know they check email every day. However if you are targeting young money conscious families – offering them something more than just information, such as a coupon or discount that they can print directly from the email blast may be the way to go.
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Fonts
Think about your target audience when you are choosing your fonts. Is your target audience women only? Then light, feminine and trendy fonts may be suitable. Is your target audience corporate men? Then a masculine, straight edged, heavier font may be what you are after. Or in the case of our SOS Kids magazine, youthful fonts are used throughout to evoke the feeling of “young and playful”. Your fonts must be reflective of your target audience, but they must also reflect the feeling your audience gets when they think about your product.
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Content
This one is the most obvious but often the most overlooked. Your content should inform your target audience about your product, but be interesting to them on their level. In what tone is your content written? Is it corporate and serious? Then your audience should be too. Is your audience younger and trendy? Then your content should be written with a light flare that is informative, yet relatable. You must also keep your target audience in mind when you decide on how much content you want on your website. If your audience has the attention span of a squirrel, then perhaps long bodies of text is NOT the way to go – but rather short, to the point information with text and imagery that stands out to get the message across. However if your audience is seeking valuable and in depth information, you can afford to have more long bodies of text.