When it comes to visual communication, some graphic design techniques are better suited to one message than another.

Knowing what the options are can come in handy when trying to figure out how best to engage users and keep them on your site or social media pages. Explore seven ways designs can help attract buyers by enhancing your promotional and branding efforts.

7 Key Graphic Design Technics For Compelling Visual Communication

1. Choose the right colors

Science of People examines how color impacts your emotions, and can spur you to buy or bounce away from a site. Consider what pain points your customers experience before heading to you for a solution. What are the underlying emotions and what colors help counteract them?

For example, someone who wants a car seat may be concerned with their baby’s safety in a vehicle. The driving emotion is fear. Try to use colors that make people feel calm and that you are trustworthy, such as blue.

You can convey fun, seriousness, and lots of other attitudes through the colors you select. They can grab attention and make other elements fade into the background. The only way to create amazing visual communication is to have a feel for graphic design techniques and what works best to attract readers.

2. Select typography with personality

Graphic design techniques often focus on choosing just the right font for a project. Typography has a personality to it — you can pick scripts for a more formal look, sans serif for modern designs, and display fonts to create a bit of fun.

Take a step back from your designs and decide if a font conveys the tone and message you wish people to pick up from your visual communications. If you are sharing data, then you will want something easy to read on a wide variety of screen sizes and devices.

3. Offer direction

You can use visualizations to communicate instructions or indicate directions. For example, you might do a graphic overlay on a piece of equipment to show which side faces up or how to use the machinery. Around 80% of graphic overlay applications are 10 mil polycarbonates, which hold up well but are cost-effective for companies.

Think about why you would use graphics directly on material and how the end user interacts with the part. Offer users direction outside of a printed manual or internet publications for quick, easy methods that make the item more user-friendly.

4. Create consistency

Focus on graphic design techniques that create consistency and make your brand seem more reliable. For example, you might always use a particular blue in any data visualization. The logo might appear in a similar location across all publications.

Think about the brand image you present to the world, and train all marketing professionals, CEOs, and other leaders in your company to stick to a similar style. Over time, your brand will develop a distinctive personality that shines through no matter who creates the material.

5. Leave ample white space

The color white has a range of shades that fall under the definition and evoke different emotions. However, in design terms, white is not necessarily a color. Also called “negative space,” white space is simply a background without any text, images, or other elements on it.

This space gives the human eye a break from all the businesses. You can add white space to set a call-to-action button apart and draw attention to it.

Including just a few pixels of white space around a visual can change the entire feel of a webpage. Look for opportunities to communicate without saying anything at all. Using enough white space shows you understand balance and are not desperate to put too much information out at one time.

6. Add a visual hierarchy

A visual hierarchy is another way to communicate tone, personality, and importance without using words to do so. For instance, the headline of most sites is in bolder, bigger letters. The user picks up on the significance of the headline when they see larger letters and ample white space surrounding it. Using the same size font and weight on subheadings, body text, and captions signals the importance of each line to the site visitor.

7. Chart and graph complex topics

In a Venngage survey, over half of marketing professionals used visuals in their content. When sharing complex topics or numbers, you can add charts and graphs to show the data.

Put yourself in the shoes of the average consumer. They may not know much about your industry. It is possible they put high school math class behind them after graduating, and have no concept of just the words and statistics shared in body text.

Put that information into a chart or graph and it suddenly becomes clearer. Adding graphics brings your writing to life and makes it more relatable to users.

Conclusion

Using graphic design techniques to pull the reader into the page has a powerful effect on users. It is possible to a story through pictures, words, graphs, and animations. For example, use a downward animated arrow to point the way to the next topic. Add a visual and typography hierarchy. Make sure any photos are highly relevant to the topic at hand. Sprinkle in charts and graphs where needed to pull readers in.

If you are in doubt about how helpful a particular visualization is, try some A/B testing and keep the elements that work best for viewers. Small changes can mean the difference between success and failure.