ARK Squared Productions

Now that you have high quality graphics the next important thing is ensuring that they are used consistently throughout your company/organization and your marketing.  When you are trying to put your best foot forward a key way to do that is to have a consistent look throughout your graphic material.  So if you have a website, business cards, brochures, stationery, etc, etc, you want to use the same logo, colours, fonts, photos and more. 

There are a number of reasons why you want a consistent look, let me list a few:

• Your company is easily recognizable.  Take big corporate brands for example – the Nike swoosh, “IBM Blue”, the McDonald’s golden arches or their catchy jingles, or a great Canadian example is Telus.  When you see Telus on TV, their vehicle wraps, envelopes, their website, wherever, you instantly know who you’re looking at because of their consistent use of colours and cute animals.
• You portray a professional image.  If you hand out a business card referring someone to your website and they have the same look you can make a very good impression.
• It shows you’re organized – you have a game plan.  You’re not just doing things “off the cuff”, you’ve thought things through.  You’ve done the research to get an effective logo, colours, etc, and are portraying that through the consistency.
• Makes your material easy to read.  How annoying would it be if you sat down to relax with a good novel and the font changed every paragraph?  It would drive you nuts and negate the “relax” time!  Same goes for your promotional materials – if every way you present yourself visually to a client is different you would confuse them.
• It saves you money!  Once you get your logo, colours and overall “look” together it’s faster for your graphic designer to produce different items.  A good website can make designing a business card or brochure a snap.  Or if you run print advertisements regularly you can use the same basic framework each time and just change some of the content, if you need to at all, and this can save money with the place you are advertising especially if you purchase a batch of advertisements.  Another saving is if you re-use photos because you will not need to hire someone to take more or purchase additional stock photos.

So remember, when you’re coming up with your company’s marketing plan choose graphic elements that can be used for many different purposes.  It will be easy to recognize, increase your professionalism and save you money!