Good Design for Business Is More Than Meets the Eye

This week, we needed some posters designed for an event promotion, but our art director was temporarily out of commission. We were able to scrape something together in Word but it was a far cry from what we had hoped. Here is what we came up with initially:

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Here is what we were able to get done in time for the event:

Cognitively speaking, both of these are obviously flyers for Boba Guys. Neither flyer is "wrong." So aside from the lazy kerning on "night," why is one more effective than the other?

The cleaned-up typography helps, as does the reorganized hierarchy of information, but that's all graphic design 101. The big difference, though, is that we believe that businesses—good businesses, anyway—have personality, and that trust is related to personality. By making conscious decisions about the personality of your business, you shape perceptions.

Steve Jobs famously said that "when you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back."

Attention to design details (everything from poster design to stickers to the voice recording for your answering machine) imply that the same care and attention has been spent on the other, less visible parts of your business—which implies that you are in the business of making trustworthy products.

The Boba Guys share their adventures in food enterprise every Monday.