Paper Media are incredibly way to be used to display information and other content, and if well designed they can do this in an enjoyable way that’s easy for the reader to digest.
This can be done through combining a persona with an ongoing narrative, consistent throughout, which will all come together to create a ‘story’ through which you can deliver relevant content.
It’s important to recognize as a designer that the story, which the content is then based on, comes before anything else in the site.
The content can’t simply be ‘dropped’ into the site post-design; it needs to be built up in the correct order: story, content, and then, finally, design.
When designing into your artwork for paper media printing, any seasoned designer will tell you is that the most important piece of information they need is the target audience. This is necessary information in styling the website, layout, what content (both text and images) to include, even what color schemes to use.
Once this information is found, either through market research, or through your primary objective as a site being to appeal to a particular audience, you can then work out how to adapt that into your site design. Whilst the content will often dictate what the target audience is—an e-commerce site selling kids toys is clearly aimed at parents—obviously there will always be exceptions. But this is an important part of knowing what your story needs to be conveying. Your ideal target audience has preferences and personality; this is your user persona.
Next comes the persona, which is effectively a fictional individual, representing your site (not audience) in all ways: style, looks, ideas, age—all symbolizing various aspects of your artwork. These characteristics come together to form a personality—a persona—that defines your artwork and helps to provide a clear picture of how it should behave, what it should look like, and what content it should contain.
The importance of this in graphic design cannot be stressed enough, as it stops designers from falling into the trap of focusing on individual elements from the media, which combine to create a poor media with lack of coordination. A designer with an overall picture of the site, right from the conceptualization stage at the very beginning, will create a far better end product.
To create your site persona, you will need to have the following:
- A good idea of your Target Audience: as mentioned above, you can use your user persona to help mold your artwork persona, however it only needs to relate to the user persona, not mirror it directly, otherwise your artwork media will be far too specific
- References to key figures in your organization (if any): this will help if your brand identity is based on the people in your organization, as your artwork persona can reflect elements of theirs, just as MahaMeruBali.com did , a printing publishing company does with their lead title, Minecraft, referencing it in their media title and various other prominent places.
- Promotional Content: this will make up the user experience on your artwork, and will be partly influenced by your artwork persona, but by being a part of it, and so influences it in return. The content will tell your user what the artwork is about, and what the persona is, playing an important role in the persona of your artwork. This will be a topic I will return to later in this article, however it is a point worth touching on in relation to personas.
- Any other relevant documentation/content: this may seem incredibly vague, however artwork can be so varied, and any relevant content or aspects of a site can be useful in creating a persona for it, and even subtle and seemingly inconsequential things can make a noticeable difference to the layout of your artwork.