Researching Companies

CGR 115

Alright, so for this blog post, I'm gonna talk about researching clients and companies that I might design for. If you are going to build an effective design, you need to know something about the company your designing advertisements for. The purpose of an advertisement is to get the word out about services or goods that are being offered, and to try to convince people that your product or service is the best in some aspect or another to gain more clients. To this effort, having a good understanding of the strong and weak points of the company your designing for, knowing what they are involved in, and what that actually means can really help make a design something flat and just pretty, to something that people can understand and relate to even.

When it comes to researching a client, you want to do a pretty thorough job, first off you should know in advance what types of advertisement you are creating, whether they want flyer's for a fundraiser event, brochures about their company/organization/club, or even business cards and letterheads, but no matter what form of advertisement they want, you need to know about the company first. To successfully create an identity for a company, you need to create a brand for them, I've gone over this briefly last semester, and it applies more heavily now than it did then. We are starting at the very beginning in this class and redesigning the logo for Osaki Tourism, a website and company that is already in existence, but for this class we are acting as though we were the designers assigned to redesign everything, the logo, letterheads, everything that this company needs for a corporate brand.

Reading up on the company and clients, seeing the thoughts and opinions of other clients and customers about what the company is about, what is their best strength and why they choose to go to such a store over other options. The entire point of advertisement is to show your strong points, to convince people that your company is the best, to spread the word about your company, and to give people an understanding of what you do and why you do it. A good designer can make a pretty image to satisfy the clients wants, but a great designer can make a logo that not only looks amazing, but connects to the demographic its aiming for, while giving people a good idea about what the company is about by simply their logo that is on all their material.

Names of companies can be misleading at times, though the company name might suggest one thing, in actuality it can represent something so different, and its that reason that you must research it, because the company is trying to convey their personal identity through their logo and name, those are the two most memorable parts, therefore they must be the most memorable and creative, but a great name with a lousy logo or vice verse doesn't work, you need to have a great name that you can incorporate into the logo to connect the dots and gain the attention of your demographic.

Well, I myself need to conduct some research on a company that we get to redesign, therefore I'll let you know my progress as I go.