Research is not just the first step of the creative process; it is one of the most important. If you do your research right, you can create more ideas, better ideas, more fitting ideas, and get these ideas approved easily. There are big books being written about doing research, in this article we’ll look at the basics of visual research.
You should start collecting ideas before meeting your first client. Create a swipe file (OneNote, Evernote, etc.) and keep everything in it, that you find and like. Keep pictures of stuff that catches your eye during the day, use Google’s image search (although I like DuckDuckGo as a search engine better), make screenshots of YouTube videos that expose you to things you love, and keep notes on books you read.
Try to categorize what you find and create different folders for design styles, typical design questions, or reoccurring tasks.
• Style categorize could be: Minimalism, colourful, black and white, font-focused, photo-effects, text-effects…
• Design questions could be: Logo design for big brands, logo design for small companies, logo design for sports teams, logo design for e-sports…
• Reoccurring tasks could be: YouTube header, e-book cover, t-shirt designs, business cards, flyers, wedding invitations…
Over time, your collection will find a personal structure that makes it easy for you to find relevant information and inspiration.
Besides the general collection of information, you should always do specific research for jobs and clients. How this research should look like in detail, is dependant on the job you’re doing it for.
In general, do basic research before any client interviews. Do specific research only after collecting information from your clients – they know their business and their target demographic better than we could ever research it. Listen to them.
Look for repetition and oddballs.
Whatever is repeated in a certain field is repeated for a simple reason: It works!
In addition to doing what works, you want to add a detail that makes your design special. This is where the oddballs come into play. These are design features only few companies use in your field.
This logo by SourceForge uses basic shapes (circles) and a simple wordmark with a regular and bold style font. These elements are very typical in logo design (the repetition). The oddball is the arrangement of the circles. This is what gives the logo its uniqueness.
Look for repetition and oddballs in:
• Shapes
• Colours
• Composition
• Effects
• Fonts
• Negative space
• Texture
The final step is to project the information you have onto the current client project. What would the elements of the SourceForge logo look like for my current client project? Would the colours work? Would the shapes work? Would the oddball make sense? Would the font work?
Doing this in the research phase helps you create more specific ideas later on in the design phase.
