By Emma Sexton, Founder and Creative Director at Make Your Words Work™
How many times as a designer have you heard the phrase can you ‘make it look pretty?’. When this is the request you know that you will be used at the end of the project when there is little time to do anything else but styling. It’s a common, frustrating phrase but you can’t blame our clients for thinking that this is the only way visual design can be applied to their content.
Imagine this scenario - you need a builder to help you renovate your home, but have no idea about DIY. You DO know that you want your house to be more open plan, you have a clear idea of how it needs to function and a good understanding of who will be living in the house. You are excited about collaborating with the builder and discovering how they will help you – after all they are the experts. But the builder arrives and asks you to tell them exactly what to do and even how to do it. How would you feel? Frustrated? Would you feel confident that they even know what they are doing? Would you even want to pay them for their time afterwards when you have even had to tell them what to do? Quite often the builder in this story is how the designer works with their clients, so it is no wonder design is so often undervalued.
Visual design and storytelling is vastly becoming the hot new topic. Research shows our brains process imagery 60,000 times faster than text and with our attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, marketers need visual design more than ever. After three years of seeing our clients face the same challenges we decided it was time to help them on a bigger scale with a ‘Design Event for Non-Designers’. On Tuesday 22nd September 2015 we will be putting on a one day event hosted by Thomson Reuters and produced by Anne-Marie Sheedy from Life is Too Short. This year the theme is ‘unleash the power of visual design’ and we already have Diageo, We Are Social, Scriberia and Jelly London confirmed as speakers.
All of our attendees will take away 10 actionable ‘amendments’ for how they can create and deliver better visual content. The speakers we have lined up will be sharing tips on applying design thinking, visual storytelling ideas, psychological techniques and much, much, more.
Our ‘amendments’ will include:
- How to gain attention on social media with the power of visual storytelling
- How to ensure visual design has an impact beyond ‘making it look pretty’
- Discover how to harness the power of design thinking to transform your business from the inside out
- Learn the key visual design psychological tips tricks to make your content more engaging
- How to unlock the power of visual design
- Discover how to get the very best from your design team and transform the way they work with you
- Walk away with a better understanding of visual design and how it helps marketing, brands and businesses succeed.
- How visual design enhances your digital products in more ways than you realised
- How to make complex content simple – and engaging
Tickets are on sale NOW, so help us spread the word amongst your clients. The first 20 Super Earlybird ticket holders will be invited to attend an exclusive whiskey brand tasting session with the Global Design Director at Diageo.
