by Malachi Jackson

There’s a certain something about a well-designed graphic that draws me to any type of publication. When I get a flyer in the mail or read an ad in the newspaper I know that if the product they are selling is presented well, the editor has may attention. This is an accomplishment on their end because my attention is something that is hard to acquire just like most other consumers. According to market research conducted by DraftFCB on a pool of 1,000 consumers, the average consumer gives up on point-of-sale ads in 1.7 seconds and on Internet advertisements in 15 seconds. So what is an advertiser to do in this world of fickle consumers with short attention spans?

Graphic Design can go a long way in grabbing the attention of the masses and often times a good Graphic Designer knows how to get an idea across without stating the blatantly obvious. In order to do this, a Graphic Designer needs to make a statement without words and instead utilize color theory and symbolism, among other things, to get a point across. These essentials mixed with an artist’s point of view can make for a profound statement translated into a designed graphic.

Steve Jobs coined the term “Lickable” when describing the newly designed and polished graphics of Mac OS X back in the year 2000. He describes “lickable graphics” as a graphic that is so polished that you literally want to taste it. To put this into perspective lets go back to the year 2000 when Steve Jobs made this statement. Mobile gadgets were on the brink of a huge surge in popularity, Dot Com Companies were all the rage, and Microsoft was touting the future release of its new software called Windows Me. Dan Tynan of PCWorld would later coin this as the “worst version of Windows ever released…” calling it Windows Mistake Edition. In addition to glitches and missing features, the graphics of Windows ME were still reminiscent of Windows 95, making no substantial innovations in it’s look and feel. This was a prime opportunity for Apple to come out with an Operating System that takes a different approach to interacting with a computer. Mac OS X came on to the scene as a competitor that takes the design and feel of a computer’s graphics as a serious aspect of an operating system. Apple’s operating system would later be the foundation for Apple’s graphic laden iOS platform for mobile devices.

The graphic content of Apple’s software platforms has become the corner stone of the company that goes along with the company’s state of the art hardware design. If you look at Mac OS X today you can tell that Apple made graphics a major part of its programming. From something as simple as a program’s icon or as complex as image, color, and text rendering in the operating system. The eye-catching graphics of Mac OS X easily translate to Apple’s iOS devices and can be described as “lickable” on both the large and small screens.

So what does this mean for advertisers designing an ad? Take a lesson from Apple and make your graphics lickable. Design icons and images in 3D with shadows and highlights, pay attention the curvature of a typeface and make sure that it is rendered correctly without pixilation, also make sure colors are always dynamic with variations that can be achieved by the medium they are presented on. All of these things make the graphics jump off the page and grabs the attention of the observer. When you take what Steve Jobs has taught us about lickable graphics and apply it to all aspects of graphic design, your design can become something observers not only notice but something they really want a taste of and then love it.

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