The visual part of the marketing mix

Visual marketing is an important part of delivering your message

With digital media becoming more important in our lives we’re all having to embrace this way of communicating. And that’s what digital is, a way of communicating.

Digital communications often include graphic elements. I’m not just talking about pretty pictures or ‘cool’ design here. The way things are laid out and presented can convey such a great amount of information, meaning and emotion.

Online tools like Canva are opening up the world of graphic design to many people.

I started to look back at the campaigns we’ve run for events over the last few years at Greenslate, I have been doing lots of design work.

When I just concentrated on photography as a career, I was a massive Photoshop user. I also spent more hours than I like to think about creating graphics in Adobe Illustrator, making posters etc.

These days, I try not to use those tools because I’m taking a more minimalist approach to life and want to simplify things, slim them down, become more efficient at what I do.

For about a year now I’ve been using a handy tool called Canva. It doesn’t have anything like the massive possibilities of Photoshop and Illustrator, but I think that’s its strength.

Less is more

I believe having narrower options can actually stimulate your creativity. Having a simpler toolset makes you concentrate on the design and speed up your production. The constraints become part of the process by giving less creative choices.

Canva has freed me up by encouraging me to spend less time designing and more time on other parts of the promotion work I have to do. Things like writing copy or adapting the design to fit onto the website.

The tools in Canva are the basics you need to create something usable. They’re tools that fulfil 90% of people’s needs.

Great features

Probably the biggest feature within Canva I love the most is the ‘resize’ facility. When you have to adapt your design to work across different platforms, this is a real time-saver.

For a typical campaign, I’ll have to produce:

• A poster
• An A5 flyer
• A Facebook event post
• A Facebook page post
• An Instagram post
• A website page graphic
• A website feature image
• Several Facebook and Instagram post updates

All of those formats use different shape ratios, sizes, resolutions and graphic types. Doing all of that in Photoshop and/or Illustrator would be a massive time-suck. Doing it in Canva is much quicker.

Canva allows me to resize designs and generate multiple versions. And, it gives me the ability to split off different elements of a design for use on a website.

I export elements of the design as transparent .png files to reassemble them on the website. This way the web design matches the other media I create.

I’m not ready to put ‘Graphic Designer’ on my CV, but I’m happy to acknowledge Graphic Design is a developing skill within my toolset.

New tools change the game

Let’s face it, a tool like Canva could take work away from graphic designers. High-quality camera phones took work from me as a professional photographer.

I remember web designers turning their noses up at WordPress as a website platform years ago, but now loads of them use it.

Technology is changing the world week by week, and there will always be a space for the professional. But, tools like Canva can put professional levels of graphic design into the hands of ordinary people.

There are some skills to learn when using Canva, but the learning curve is much smaller than using the heavyweights of Photoshop and Illustrator.

If you’re marketing online for your business, having these skills is becoming a necessity if you need to represent yourself and promote your business.

If you want to know more about using these tools in your business or would like me to help you with your campaigns, don’t hesitate to contact me. Send me a question today.