5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Design Using Psychology

From repeating visual elements to taking a minimalist approach, here are a few ways you can design for your customers’ subconscious preferences.

Improve Your Marketing Design Using Psychology

Nowadays, graphic design has become a valuable digital marketing pillar. Graphic design enhances your marketing deliverables across all online communication channels, whether it’s to create an engaging website, eye-popping email campaign, outstanding PowerPoint presentation or viral social media campaign. Well-crafted visuals optimize the experience between the customer and the brand, strengthening relationships, generating recognition and boosting sales.

The key to amazing marketing design? Create the way people think. Mixing the right colors or photos isn’t enough, you need to understand what motivates the buyer’s behavior to convert. It’s crucial to focus your initial research on the idea that all actions, feelings, thoughts, even consciousness itself, are just the products of neural activity in the brain. If you have a total comprehension of the human brain, you can increase your sales exponentially.

Let’s explore five guiding principles on how you can use psychology to improve your graphic design assets.

1. Minimalist Graphic Design Focuses Users on What Really Matters

Digital marketing is based on clear concise writing and minimalist design. As the famous designer Massimo Vignelli, known for creating the subway map of the city of New York, the Bodoni type font, all the Bloomingdale’s packaging and the American Airlines logo, used to say: “Minimalism is not a style, it is an attitude, a way of being. It’s a fundamental reaction against noise, visual noise, disorder and vulgarity.”

Minimalism might feel like just another fad, but it’s one that has some unexpected benefits. It can actually benefit mental health because its emphasis on ‘less’ can give the human brain a bit of a break.

Minimalist design and its principles (repetition, formal simplicity and the use of voids) should be taken as the first option when you are designing all the marketing assets destined to sell your products and/or services.

Here are a few ways to embrace a minimalist marketing design approach:

• Repetition: Limit the variation of your design elements
• Formal simplicity: Try to only use perfect geometric shapes and uninterrupted lines
• Use of voids: Leave empty white space to enhance the elements in your design

2. Group Your Design Elements to Improve Customer Engagement

Proximity gives a visual indication of what information is related without putting too much effort on your audience. The reality is most of your viewers will scan your content — they don’t read every single section of copy placed in front of them — so your design shouldn’t have too many things vying for their attention.

By grouping elements together, related digital design content becomes significantly easier to take in.

For example, the list on the left has no kind of categorization; everything has the same spacing and there is no visual indication of what’s related and what’s not. Meanwhile, the list on the right incorporates this design practice and is therefore much more manageable. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re creating text is not using precise spacing and perfect categorization.

3. Build A Strong Visual Connection Between Your Design Elements

Alignment helps the eyes send messages to the brain to form a visual connection between the information in front of you and its space disposition. This gives the eyes a soft edge to follow. The strength of the alignment is what gives strength to your whole layout, making it feel more cohesive.