Designing With Brand At Heart

ShopTalk’s Paul Ferry on the importance of brand expression in great web design.

- Paul Ferry

There aren’t many terrible websites out there. There are so many generic templates available, many for free, that most of them are okay. But there’s certainly room for more great websites.

A website is one of the most important part of a brand’s arsenal. It’s a shopfront, a dedicated environment in which to communicate with vast numbers of people. And to each of those people, what they see, feel and experience while they’re there goes a long way toward shaping how they perceive that brand. It’s the difference between the amazing and the average. So how do we get it right?

EARS OPEN, PEOPLE

Really listening to the people behind the brand is vital. Those initial meetings are the perfect opportunity to take in as much as possible and get under a brand’s skin. Often, a lot of what gets thrown up won’t be on the brief but will be gold dust nonetheless, so it’s important that we open our eyes and ears and shut our mouths, at least in the initial stages. Designers need to know from the get-go what a brand wants to get across to the people it’s targeting and where it wants to go commercially.