Good brand design is product-related, customer-friendly, and profitable. That’s right: by strengthening your brand identity with good graphics, you’re boosting sales and creating a stronger foundation for future ad campaigns.
So you’ve got a solid set of brand guidelines. You’ve got your logo and brand colors at the ready. How do you use them to make design part of your business strategy? It would be time-consuming, not to mention expensive, to start branding everything indiscriminately, from your office space to your employees’ lanyards. If you’re wondering where to start, we’ve got the list for you.

Here are 8 graphic design essentials every business needs:

1) Business Cards

Business cards are a low-cost way to make a great first impression. They’re simple things: just a small card with your brand name and contact information, but they carry a huge weight. 72% of people will form judgments on your company based on your business card, and 39% will simply avoid doing business with you if they think it’s ugly.
88% of business cards are thrown away within a week, but doing away with them completely is not the solution. According to the Adobe Blog, “The trick is to elevate each design beyond normal expectations.”

2) Stationery

You can keep your voice on-brand by designing correspondence accordingly. Graphics can go on your printed letterheads, custom envelopes, or inline email graphics.
Don’t just get your message across — do it with style. That way, you win the confidence of your recipients. Not convinced? Well, emails with graphics have a 25.16% higher open rate and a 4.11% higher click-through rate. The more visually pleasing your text is, your message has a better chance of being actually read.

3) Slideshow Templates

In a poll of over 400 public speakers, 84.3% said their slideshows were more visually focused, with each presentation only a quarter-filled with text. However, they admitted to spending anywhere from 2 to 8 hours creating these slideshows.
Every business needs a slideshow design template they can use and re-use in meetings. With proper rules of imaging, typography, and colors already in place, presenters can then focus on the content without having to spend hours on layout every time. Checkout our article on designing an effective presentation to learn more or our presentation design services if you need help.

4) Brochures, Leaflets, & Flyers

In this digital world, print is still very much relevant. Daily gadget use has left us slightly blasé about the information we receive during screentime — internet fatigue. Up to 79% of leaflet recipients keep, pass on, or read leaflets. Brochures, on the other hand, are often decried as expensive. However, they are relatively low-cost and still highly effective. People prefer pocketing and reading trifold brochures than in-depth service catalogs.

5) Blog Graphics

Articles with images get 94% more views. Also, BuzzSumo analyzed over 1 million articles and found out that inserting one image every 75-100 words resulted in twice the amount of social media shares. Generations of people have claimed they like reading “books with pictures,” and that’s obviously still the case in the internet age.

6) Social Media Posts

You’re missing out on a lot of marketing if you’re not uploading graphics to your social media pages. Tweets with images are 150% more likely to be retweeted, and Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without images.

7) Infographics

Infographics can boost your web traffic up to 12%, while — get this — people following instructions with text and graphics do 323% better than people following purely verbal directions. People also tend to share infographics online three times more than any other type of visual content.

8) Merch Design

In a study by the BPMA of over 15,000 people who received promotional products, 66% of participants said they could recall the brands of merch received in the past year, while companies said the ROI on promotional products was comparable to TV and print. 79% of recipients were likely to become repeat customers, and a whopping 87% kept the item for longer than a year.
Bottom line: people love free swag!

Your visual strategy matters. For one thing, it helps people decide what they feel about your company. That may be a scary thought, but there’s no other solution but to get (your graphics) as well-dressed as possible.
The good news is that you don’t need to spend thousands of bucks or hundreds of hours to get it all done. Design Pickle offers unlimited graphic design for a flat monthly rate. Our professional graphic designers created the above examples: real requests, posted with the permission of real clients. Give us a try today!