Packaging. It’s something most people don’t necessarily think about, perhaps partly due to the fact that it is so overwhelmingly pervasive. Even just picking up groceries for the week, in a single forum we are subjected to the end results of thousands of individual design and branding endeavours; some good, some bad, and the rest forgettable.

Design in business is much more than just catchy ads. You can use design to generate new ideas and turn them into innovative and competitive products and services, improve your business processes and strengthen and deepen your marketing approach.

If used systematically across your business, design can bring a range of measurable commercial benefits:

• Improved sales and conversion rates
• Improved market position
• Greater customer loyalty
• A stronger and more credible identity for your business
• The ability to open up new markets

If ever there were an overly competitive industry with little to no regulation, it would be the commercial design industry. Any child with a computer and some basic software can market themselves as a designer, while the true industry suffers wide scale devaluation and thousands of business owners are taken for a ride by unqualified or even unscrupulous “designers”.

As a consumer, how do you protect yourself and your company? The answer is more simple than you may think – all you have to do is a bit of homework.

How strong is your website’s immediate appeal? According to a Carleton University study published earlier this year in the academic journal Behaviour & Information Technology, web designers have only 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.

In less than the blink of an eye, your internet users have already formed an opinion about your website and by extension, your company. Participants in three studies were first asked to rate a series of web pages according to their aesthetic appeal after viewing them for 50 milliseconds, and were then asked to examine each site more carefully and provide a new rating. Confirming the old saying that a first impression is often a lasting one, the researchers found no significant difference between the two ratings. This means that in that first 50 milliseconds, your audience has already sussed you out.

The concept of creativity is an abstract one, at best. The dictionary tells you that when you ask for creativity, you can expect to see “the ability to use the imagination to develop new and original ideas or things, especially in an artistic context.” This is all well and good if you’re in the market for something astonishing to frame and hang on your wall, but in the context of business design it falls somewhat short of adequate

One of the key elements in building relationships with clients (and prospective clients) is constant contact. But as plain a concept as it is, simply keeping in touch can be a tricky feat. By now, surely every modern business has at least a basic understanding of the potential impact of electronic communication, but how effectively do they use it? This article outlines a few of the foundational elements of building a successful email newsletter campaign.

With brand revitalization and product redesigns rolling out more quickly than ever before, it’s clear that design and innovation are becoming the hot topic for business. Apple is a prime example, constantly pushing the envelope and driving the market, the iPod has become an icon of fanatic consumer loyalty and yet, the increasingly rapid rollover to bigger (or smaller) and better models is met with pocketbooks held wide open and the competition struggling to keep up. Apple has brought the impact of effective design in business to the forefront.