Having the right message and content is important, but how is it packaged together? Without a creative and impactful visual language, your message could be getting lost. With 94% of all first impressions of your brand based on design, you can’t afford not to have a powerful visual language.
What is a Visual Language?
A Visual Language for a campaign is slightly different to brand guidelines, however, they take this into consideration. Campaign visual languages don’t replace a brand’s visual identity but essentially tweak them in order to optimise them for the campaign goal. A successful visual language will ensure a campaign looks united and encourages cognitive recognition across all touchpoints of the campaign. There are lots of different parameters that form a visual language. These include:
- Illustration style
- Icon style
- Colour Palette
- Typography
Having a visual language ensures a standard of quality that can transpire in all materials for the campaign and ensures that every touchpoint is on-brand and not just on-campaign. Ultimately, this can help you drive higher conversions.
How to Create a Visual Language
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Identify Goals
Think about what your marketing campaign wants to achieve. A campaign strategy will already have established this. By having your goals top of mind whilst defining your visual language, it ensures that all content and assets to the campaign don’t lose sight of this. Although an overall campaign can have multiple goals, but remember each individual asset and piece of visual content should have only one goal.
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Consider your target audience
Again, another aspect that would be defined in your campaign strategy, but each piece of visual content has to appeal to the exact target audience you require. Remember, a campaign based target audience can differ from your brand audience, particularly when you’re breaking into new markets. Your visual language has to consider how your audience likes to communicate, what visually resonates with them, how do they engage, and where do they engage.
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Establish Your Voice
Design styles for your visual language should take the goals and target audience into consideration. By doing so, be more successful in terms of your engagement goals. Think about the ethos of your campaign – what do you want to portray? How do you want your audience to feel? What typography, colour palette, and graphic style will achieve this? Are you modern or traditional? Are you minimalist or busy? For example, if your goal is to establish through leadership in the tech industry, what visual language will build credibility and consumer trust?
A visual language is the ultimate checklist for guaranteeing consistent quality and messaging across your campaign. The right messaging creates trust and trust can drive revenue. Furthermore, you can save money by ensuring planning happens once rather than requiring the strategic planning with every new visual asset. Thump Creative always considers every aspect of campaign we work on, whether they’re digital, social, or print. For us, strategy comes first and inspires our creativity.