Graphic Design is a lot more than just pretty pictures, it’s a communication tool between us and our customers.  First impressions matter, and quality, consistent design can not only make you look more professional, it can also make you look more credible to a prospective buyer.  The stronger your design, the more people trust you.  We’ve all experienced clicking on a website, and thinking to ourselves that this company looks truly amateurish, or even creepy.  Artistic companies are no different. 
     It’s funny, because you’d think as creatives we’d be great at presenting ourselves graphically… but that doesn’t appear to be the case.  That’s where the true creative and professional skill of the graphic designer becomes so important.  You might consider hiring your design needs out to a professional, after all, you wouldn’t hire an amateur painter to do a mural on your wall.  The issue isn’t one of a lack of respect for the designer, but rather the economics involved.  Sure it would be better to hire all these services out, but if we don’t have the funds to do that, we simply must learn to do things on our own, until we CAN afford to hire the best.
     So why is graphic design so important?  Well it seems that 90 percent of what is transmitted in our brains is visual.  That’s huge.  And 3M did research that indicates that images are processed 60,000 times faster in our brains than text.  Amazing.  So your visual messaging is received and absorbed before customers even have a chance to read your witty ad copy.  Then consider that over half of us, 65%, are visual learners anyway.   Imagine just how powerful that is from a marketing standpoint.  And if visual communication is important, imagine how much more powerful video becomes.
     We need to brand everything we do.  We need to have a uniform look and style that is reflected in everything from our website, to our business cards, social media accounts, newsletters, presentations, and videos.  In fact, we should have a style guide, like the big companies and organizations do.  We should know what colors, fonts, logo designs and styles to use.  We should shy away from changing our branding very often.  Consider how long CocaCola has had the same logo.  That consistency of style and branding is perceived by people as professional, successful, and trustworthy. 

John Bishop Fine Art's "Conversations for Freelance Creatives" is a weekly blog/vlog/podcast that creates a community, a conversation, between creatives in all sorts of fields at all sorts of levels.  We want to discuss what we’re learning, what we’ve experienced, and whom we’ve met in our journey of running a freelance creative business. John Bishop is a visual artist living in Houston, Texas. His work is largely abstract, and explores how to turn mythic, archetypal symbols into individual experiences allowing us to see them in a new way, with fresh eyes. His work can be seen online, or at his studio at Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards Street, Studio 108, in Houston.

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