Visual Vocabulary 
Does your website match your other marketing materials?
Does your business card look anything like your email newsletter?
Do you have several incarnations of your logo and color scheme throughout your materials?
Do your marketing pieces even look like they're all coming from the same company?
Or, maybe your problem is that all of your marketing pieces look exactly the same — to the point that a prospect won't read them because they assume they've already read them before!
If you answered "yes" to any of the questions above, then your business probably doesn't have a consistent and flexible Visual Vocabulary developed, and you're missing out on a hugely important piece of your brand.
Your Visual Vocabulary is an essential tool in your business's brand identity toolkit. It is made up of all of the graphics that supplement your logo, forming the graphic "face" of your business and anchoring your brand identity.
What Does A Visual Vocabulary Do?
Think of your logo as the "superhero" of your brand, and the Visual Vocabulary elements as its "sidekicks"; in many design applications and finished materials, your logo won't appear by itself. It will have the help of all of these Visual Vocabulary elements to accomplish its job of communicating and connecting with your target market.
A Visual Vocabulary also adds even more consistency to your brand's marketing materials. Beyond having stark, white materials with your logo, address and some text on them, a Visual Vocabulary adds several more pieces that you can
A Visual Vocabulary helps to combat entreprenurial boredom by being flexible and allowing you to change some of the components of your business brand. So, while you're always going to have the same logo on your materials, you can change up your Visual Vocabulary from time to time to reflect design trends, changes in your business, or just to shake things up a bit.
A Visual Vocabulary also adds depth to your marketing and product lines. Think about the last time you were at a trade show, or saw a table with all of your competitors' marketing materials products on it. Could you tell that there were multiple products there? Or did everything blend in together?
Often times, a series of marketing pieces will be designed so that everything matches closely. But, when you're putting all of your stuff out on a table, it can wind up all looking the same.
A Visual Vocabulary can be built so that it ensures that your materials will be differentiated from one another. For example, one product line can have one set of Visual Vocabulary elements, and another product can have a different set. They'd all coordinate within the same color palette, and use similar fonts, but there would be enough of a difference that someone would be able to easily tell that you have a lot to offer.
So, Exactly What Makes Up A Visual Vocabulary?
Each small business will have different elements, depending on the types of marketing materials that you develop and your business's personality. Your Visual Vocabulary can include design elements such as:
- Font Styles: You should have a small collection of font faces, weights and classifications to use on your materials. I'll specify fonts for both print and web use, for headlines, subheads and body copy in each case, at minimum. For each style, I'll specify the typeface to use, the color it should be, and paragraph alignment.
- Colors: I'll create a color palette of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors to use when choosing colors for illustrations, graphics or any other part of your Visual Vocabulary.
- Shapes: I'll specify the types of shapes to use in your designs and illustrations to communicate your brand's personality.
- Backgrounds: Using background screens or shapes, or even a specially designed watermark can give your materials an extra bit of flair.
- Photographs: I'll suggest a series of inexpensive stock photos with the correct personality and subject matter for your website and marketing materials.
- Special Text Treatments: For very special text that you want to highlight, such as your tagline, marketing bullets, sidebars, or bullets that detail your specialties.
- Paper Type: I'll suggest specialty papers that will make your materials stand out.
How Do I Get One?
I can develop a Visual Vocabulary in two ways:
- Stand-alone Visual Vocabulary. If you plan to design your own marketing materials, then getting a professional logo and Visual Vocabulary designed is a good first step.
As a project deliverable, you'll get several, flexible sets of Visual Vocabulary elements that will contribute to your brand's memorability. You'll be able to use these in Illustrator, Photoshop and Microsoft Word documents to create consistent marketing materials for your business. You can also design your Visual Vocabulary elements into your website. And, you'll get a report on how to best use all of the components
You can see a sample of this approach to building a Visual Vocabulary in the Good Elements piece in my portfolio.
In this approach, I don't typically design any applications of the Visual Vocabulary — so, no completed marketing material samples are provided. But, that is available as an upgrade to this package.
For a custom quote on a stand-alone Visual Vocabulary, please contact me.
- In-Place Visual Vocabulary. When I design a Custom Marketing Package for a small business, I typically develop a Visual Vocabulary at the same time. Designing the materials and Visual Vocabulary together is called an in-place Visual Vocabulary.
Designing a Visual Vocabulary in place has several advantages. Since the elements are being designed in context, they can be fine-tuned to best relate to one another and to the overall layout of the marketing piece. And, at the end of the project, you have several pieces that are ready to be printed or launched online and can be used to immediately start growing your business.
An In-Place Visual Vocabulary can be either very flexible, with different pieces designed for each marketing piece, like Maryanne Comaroto's or Artemis Training's. Or, it can be very consistent overall like Leadersearch's or Radiance Health Solutions'. The approach taken depends on the image that you'd like your business to project, and the number of marketing pieces that you plan to design. The frequency with which you send things out and create new materials can also be a factor in deciding which appproach to take.
As a project deliverable, you get all of the completed, designed materials. If you'd like to design your own materials in the future, I can design templates for you or provide you with the stand-alone Visual Vocabulary elements as a package upgrade.
For a ballpark quote on developing your marketing materials with an In-Place Visual Vocabulary, please visit my Custom Marketing Package Design Estimator.
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