How do different business contexts impact on the design process?

The context of any business always has a substantial impact on the design process, as different kinds of businesses at different levels of industry have different design needs. For example, a small starter business would have no branding or guidelines in place so it requires broad research and for the designer to create the guidelines for future designs. In contrast a big global corporation would have strict regulations and limitations that the designer would have to follow and as a result wouldn’t have much room for research or creative flare.

What the business does is also another thing that can dictate the designer’s choices when it comes to things such as colour, font and imagery. Businesses such as fashion boutiques would call upon feminine, sometimes expensive colours such as deep purples and pinks where as a plumping company would probably want blue. Fonts for a boutique would be elegant, chic and most likely script, while bold, modern, san serifs are most fitted to plumbing businesses. Different areas of industry hold different stereotypes when it comes to imagery, font and colour and although it is always a good idea to do something more creative and different to standout, these stereotypes are there for a reason and your work will always appeal to the right target market if you work with these stereotypes. A simple example of this is recycling companies using the colour green and the renewable circle icon. 

A lot of the time the design process relies heavily on research and locating the right kind of information. The research stage of the design process can take many forms; mainly internet research is favoured for its speed. When I am looking for information I search for business of the same context as the one I am designing for. This is usually really helpful as it gives you an idea of what the target market for that business, however you can sometimes fall into the trap of creating similar designs and not pushing boundaries and creating something new.

Creating a Brochure in Freehand

One of the projects I have worked on recently has been a brochure for a florist shop. The project involved me working on a variety of software’s to produce the final outcome. 

To begin with I set out the layout in Freehand using the rulers to measure borders and page layout. The customer wanted the brochure to be mainly images with a few captions put on to summarise her business. The photos that she sent over were quite dark and some had a glare from the sun reflecting on them so I took these photographs into Photoshop and adjusted the brightness and edited the shadow and highlights. When the pictures looked equal I then cropped then down so that they looked there best.

Then in Freehand I used the square creator tool to lay out a collage of how I wanted to pictures to sit and I then imported the edited images into Freehand and cut and pasted them into the boxes. When I had got the layout right I worked on the aesthetics of the design. I wanted to use the flower part of their logo blown up in the background. To do this I took their logo into Photoshop and cropped out everything that I didn't want. I then used the magic wand tool to select the background and delete to so that it was transparent. After that I turned the image into grey scale and saved it as a TIFF file. When I then imported the flower into Freehand I could go into the object settings and tick the box to make the background become transparent. Then when I select a colour it only colours the object. 

The client wanted the brochure to be printed on rustic looking, recycled paper. Because of this I had to make sure that the colours stayed vibrant as because the paper has no gloss finish the colours can end up looking slightly dull and muted. This meant that where I normally would of used a darker tint of the colour I used a slightly brighter on instead. 

The client was extremely happy with the outcome and how her brochures looked, as was I.