These are interesting times to be a designer. In a profession where you are trained to develop a personal style and to hone an ability to develop original ideas, how do you mitigate the element of risk that inevitably goes along with the drive for innovation? Especially at a time when clients are being increasingly cautious when spending their budget. At Organic we have been debating this for a long time, in an attempt to develop longer and better relationships with our clients, and we think we have found something unique. We call it Crealytics.
Over the last few months we have worked closely with our Marketing Intelligence team to analyze deeply a customers emotional and physical reaction to design. To begin this we looked at the design elements that we could actually analyze, like font choice, size, amount of red utilized in the design, and a photographic trends analysis (like the use of tilt-shift photography). We assigned values to each of these elements, which enabled us to come up with a baseline metric on how that particular piece of design would perform in the eyes of the consumer, literally.
We went through a series of rigorous customer observation exercises and noticed some startling results, one of which was the use of serif over san-serif fonts. We saw customers respond with much higher font scores when we used serif fonts like Georgia ? in fact the longer the serif the higher the score returned. Could decades of Swiss design been so wrong? I personally am a huge fan of Helvetica (I loved that documentary!), but does this mean that I am doing my client a disservice by advocating it in my design? When I know that a maybe less visually impactful serif font will deliver a better ROF (return on font) for my client?