The skills of design and marketing are important tools that help to get brand familiarity across to clients and ultimately support your brand proposition. Repetition and consistency are just one of many design tools that allow designers to underpin brand ethos.
The design principles of repetition and consistency are somewhat similar and often difficult to distinguish from one another. The principles deal with repeated use of design elements that create a sense of uniformity, cohesion and most importantly familiarity.
The principles can provide great comfort to users of designs and by consistently repeating fonts, colour, patterns, shapes and even words and in turn can pull a composition together, by providing a comforting rhythm to the user. Something that we see all to often at Blue Horizons is the inconsistent use of fonts. This creates a cluttered feeling and can often be quite unsettling – an image that you certainly don't want to portray.
Whilst consistency and repetition are important, there are instances that you can forgo these principles. A great method might be to create emphasis and highlight something important. In other words, by breaking the rules you can create a contrasting element that will stand out. It is however important to remember that this should only be done for a specific purpose.
Here are a just few guidelines that help to create both a consistent and professional look:
- Use design grids to maintain consistency of your designs. Grids help ensure elements such as headers, body text and images are consistently used.
- Ensure there is a limited use of fonts on all company media, saving the use of font-styles like bold and italic for emphasis only.
- Create paragraph styles. Not only do they establish a consistent usage of styling, but they also save time!
- Choose a limited colour palette that compliments your company and consistently use this.
If you are interested in letting us help your business or would like to see examples of our work, then please don't hesitate in giving us a call on 01242 236600.
