Imagine this: you love purple and would really like to use it as the main color for your company’s website. Then your designer steps in, hears you out, shakes his head and goes like ‘No, no and no. Purple is not our brand color, nor it relates to the brand’s world’.

You roll your eyes thinking he is being a total snob. After all, purple is an amazing color that goes with absolutely anything. But you cannot possibly convince him.

You are left out wondering why this should be such a big deal when in the end it’s just a color, or just some icons, or just an image, an illustration, a pattern or a font.

Right? Not really.

Why are designers insisting on keeping design consistency?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We, as human beings, prefer familiar situations, environments, and objects. Our subconscious mind easily recognizes them and triggers predictable responses. We effortlessly remember patterns, repetitive actions, and images. That is why you need to offer customers a constant, familiar experience so that they intuitively recognize its attributes and relate to your brand’s values and key messages.

In design terms, this translates into defining your brand’s universe and using an aligned set of distinctive elements, such as colors, fonts, shapes and images that maintain a consistent visual style. It is important to know what you want your brand to be, define what it has to say and stick to it. Something apparently unimportant, like a poor font choice, could have a big impact on the message you are trying to convey. Moreover, be aware of the psychological impact that colors, photos, and other visual elements have on people, and use them in your favor.

So, to answer the main question, is your designer exaggerating?

Well, sometimes creative people have to put up quite a show to convince when purple is definitely from another world than your brand’s 🙂 But when wondering if design consistency really matters, just think about yourself when picking your clothes each morning. Even without knowing it, you put together details that are building a certain image. It speaks for yourself and adapts to the context and the message you want to transmit. The same goes for your company.

The great art is to still be yourself while doing it and discover new ways of enhancing your brand while keeping its core intact. If we can manage to handle our personal image by ourselves, we definitely need detail-obsessed designers in our lives to do this for our companies.