Design Style
Read this page or just watch the video.
Design style is pretty simple. Your design style (type, art, photos, video, colors, design elements, and layout) must help deliver your message to your audience. All your design decisions will be directed by the message and audience.
Here are a few examples:
Your client’s brand and/or marketing campaign directs the design style. What will your message look like? Everything you design fits the brand and marketing campaign—the typefaces, art, photography, colors, patterns, layouts, borders, etc. The design style focuses on appropriateness. Meaning, is the design style appropriate to deliver the brand or marketing campaign’s message to the target market?
Examples: If you really like drawing anime, and your client sells anime comic books, your design style will be a good fit. However, some designers can’t break away from their own passions and will design a web site for a drive-in hamburger restaurant using their beloved anime style—a horrible idea and a poor fit for their client.
We must be flexible as designers and think of our client’s needs. All seasoned graphic designers have the ability to design in many different styles, and they have an inventory of skills to serve their client’s needs—not just their own artistic needs.
Remember that a graphic designer works for someone else (the client). It is important to design for their needs. message and target market (customers).
Samples
MESSAGE & AUDIENCE > directs the > DESIGN STYLE
I believe that there are too many design styles to list and categorize each one. Instead, I challenge you to focus on your client’s message and/or brand and design using a style that is appropriate for them and their customers.
Simply put: Does the design style look like it goes with your client’s message and customers?
If I visit a bank’s web site, I should say to myself, “this looks like a bank should look.” (it is appropriate). If I visit a skateboarding store’s site, it should look like a skateboarding site.
Here are some examples to demonstrate the brand, marketing campaign, and design style?
Subway
BRAND: Subway’s brand is Fresh alternative to fast food (Fresh Value, Eat Fresh!)
Design Style: Fresh veggies, photos of fresh subs and food (notice no soda or chips in the main photos), and growers.
Subway Social Responsibility
Subway Kids
BRAND: Fresh alternative to fast food (Fresh Value, Eat Fresh!)
Marketing Campaign: Subway Kids. They have their own web site and lots of fun and interactive areas to involve them in the Subway kids brand experience. This site is Flash-based and “cooler” that the basic HTML-based Subway web site for older adults (grow ups this way).
Design Style: Interactive, Flash-based site that looks like a media player, colorful, no pictures of broccoli or brussel sprouts, avatar drawings of kids dressed like today’s kids, and cooler type.
Note that the brand is still intact. It is still influencing the marketing campaign and style. The Subway logo is still used. The green and gold colors are the same. The wheel on the left reflects the brand with categories including information about the food and healthy activities.
Ed Debevic’s
BRAND: 1950s style burger joint with “sassy servers” who insult you—in a humorous way.
Design Style: 1950s design elements (chrome, booths, tables, signage, etc.)—sassy, nerdy wait-staff
Rudolph’s
BRAND: 1920s “Casanova” Rudolph Valentino themed BBQ ribs restaurant with custom sauces
Marketing Campaign: Reinforce the brand image—1920s era themed silent movies/actors
Design Style: 1920s design elements—b/w, borders, wallpaper, typefaces
Halloween Style
“Natural/Organic” Style
Period/Era Design Style
These designers were challenged with creating packaging that harkened back to the 1880s. Their research and attention to detail are impressive.
- Illustration inspired by George Seurat’s, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Painted in the mid-1880s in the pointillism style. (10′ x 7′)
- Design and typography choices from the 1880s poster
