Good Design Is Good Business

Good design is good business.
From dating apps to online shopping, products, services and people are chosen based on beauty.
Successful business owners know this well, according to Arielle Kimbarovsky. She is a marketing intern at Crowdspring.
Here are some reasons to focus on design:
1. Good design makes a strong first impression: It is about using colors, shapes, textures, space, forms, images, and content in a harmonious, balanced way: A great logo design can be the difference between blending in and standing out from the competition. But while the value of a great logo is often recognize, it is not always prioritized.
New business owners often incorrectly believe that a good logo will cost thousands or tens of thousand of dollars.  As a result, they sometimes buy pre-made logos in an online logo store or try a do-it-yourself approach.
In fact, entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones who make the mistake of using generic logos-businesses of all sizes sometimes use logo shortcuts, only to find out that it’s even more expensive to rebrand later.
After all, memorable logos are 13% more likely to get consumers attention, and 71.6% more likely to get a positive response from consumers.
That approach can make a big difference in a world of noise.
Companies only have a matter of seconds before a customer makes up their mind in the digital age,.
Those few seconds are crucial because they can make or break a sale – and design plays a huge role in the deciding factor.
For example, it only takes people 10 seconds to form a first impression of a brand’s logo, but it takes 5-7 impressions for consumers to recognize the logo
Numerous studies confirm the importance of first impressions.
The same goes for websites. Three studies found that a mere 50 milliseconds were all people needed to form an opinion about a website. Google performed similar testing and found an even slimmer margin: a speedy 17 to 50 milliseconds were all people needed to decide how they felt about a website.
Good design is a signal to customers that they should buy from the company.
This is true not only online, but also for physical products.
Packaging design, for example, can alter the perception of any product.
It is nice to think that consumers make decisions on products and services strictly based on merit, with the best one winning. In spite of that hope, psychologists and retailers agree that in many cases this just isn’t true. Quality aside, sometimes the flashier, prettier or sexier product wins the day.
2. Good design helps any business stand out: Every company, no matter the industry, faces a hefty amount of competition: Creating a successful product, service or website is all about getting eyeballs to it. But the great thing about good design, it is not necessary to spend more to generate more attention.
Human beings have an attractiveness bias; they perceive beautiful things as being better, regardless of whether they actually are better. All else being equal, individuals prefer beautiful things and believe beautiful things function better. As in nature, function can follow form.
3. Good design builds customer relationships: Since relationships are based on emotion, customers are often emotionally connected to a company. A site like crowdspring these needs are leveraged in many ways.
For example, to showcase the emotions someone may go through when seeing a beautiful design, a fun illustration to show that can be offered to crowdspring’s clients will get a design their customers will love:
Good design makes it easier to create emotional connections.
A company’s designs should support the principles it espouses and through which it has built its efforts around. In short try to reach customers’ hearts (rather than their wallets).
Create valuable, sustainable customer relationships by building the brand’s visual identity on the foundation of emotional connection. There’s no better way to secure consumer loyalty than by connecting through shared values, and a great design is the most effective way to illustrate them.
Finally, a good design can help it be big tomorrow.

Arielle Kimbarovsky is a marketing intern at crowdspring – one of the world’s leading marketplaces for crowdsourced logo design, web design, graphic design, product design, and company naming services. Kimbarovsky is also a writer, artist and an undergraduate student in the School of Communications at Boston University.