I recently had coffee with one of my all time favorite creative guys, Paul Ciavarra. After meeting nearly 15 years ago, Paul and I ended up living in the same town. After catching up on each other’s lives and families, I asked Paul to lend some insight into the question: What affects your creative choices when working with a client? Without hesitation, “corporate messaging” was his immediate reply.
A company’s positioning, its core messages, and how it wants to be viewed should be the driving factor in all creative decisions. That includes color, type, and imagery, across any delivery medium—online, print, video, etc. Whether you have the benefit of working with a creative team or you need to “go it alone” as a smaller start up operation, here are some tips for making your creative execution work.
Before you begin any creative work, take the time to:
1. Define your corporate positioning. Clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and where you fit in your market.
2. Define your company’s personality. Are you aggressive or compassionate, youth-oriented or mature?
3. Define your audience. Are you talking to financial executives, consumer gamers, or software engineers?
Once you know who you are and what image you want to portray to your target audience, then you can move onto developing a creative platform that can be used across the spectrum of communications tools:
1. Choose 3-5 core colors that fit your corporate image. Don’t choose purple because YOU like it. Think about the look and feel you want to convey to your audience. Are you eco-friendly? Then you may choose browns, greens, and yellows. Financially-focused? Then perhaps darker, muted colors are more your style. Aggressive, hip? Then you’ll probably gravitate to clean, crisp, bolder colors. Regardless of your personality, sticking to 3-5 colors from a complementary palette that you repeat across the spectrum of marketing tools is a good start in designing a consistent image.
2. Use 3 complementary typefaces that are applied consistently, for example, in headlines, body text, and accents. As a conservative company you may take a traditional approach and choose a bold, sans-serif font for headlines, an elegant, serif face for body text, and a simpler italic font for captions. But, if your business is more progressive, you may opt for a complementary selection of all sans serif faces. Note that if you are working with a designer he/she may take the liberty with more, but for the novice this will keep you out of font overload. With thousands of typefaces available, and the advent of desktop publishing it’s easy to mix and match and quickly distract the reader from your message.
3. Select imagery that reflect your personality and supports your messaging. The choice between photography and illustration, stylized or direct approach, can sometimes be subjective. However, try not to influence image selection with your own preferences. Think about what would be best communicate your message to a customer. Is it important to show a piece of hardware or product packaging that will be recognizable to a consumer? Or, do you need to invoke an emotion with your audience that is best conveyed through artwork?
Regardless of the color, type, or imagery choices you make, the important thing is to remain consistent in your use of these individual elements across all of your marketing materials. And, be cognizant in your selection that all colors, and in particular, typography, translate well in traditional print, digital print, online, and video applications.
Thoughts, comments, any additional tips you’d like to share? Let me know.
