April is the month where marketing budgets tend to open up and new campaigns come to life. And of course, that was the case for many of our clients too. Opting for unlimited design subscriptions like Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video helps them explore designs and create multiple creatives for their campaigns without the fear of overrunning their budget. 

In this month’s edition of our monthly recaps, we take a look at the popular graphic designs and video designs from the month of April. 

This trip down memory lane is our favorite because it not only reinforces our faith in the ecosystem and our teams but also shows the bigger picture across different industries. 

We hope you are as excited about this as we are every month to know this! 

But before we get into the design recap, let us begin with the people who make the biggest difference to us at Kimp – our customers.

Kimp Reviews in April  

The feedback of our customers is the biggest pillar for our growth, here at Kimp. We can’t tell you many times a client’s feedback led to a new feature being launched or in clearer messaging in our marketing. We look forward to this feedback and encourage all of our clients to leave reviews, or connect with us on the live chat, so we can serve them better. 

For the month of April, our customers were very generous and came forward to share their feedback with us on various platforms. A few snippets below:

A Snapshot of Popular Designs in April at Kimp – An Analysis 

So what were the top most popular design categories at Kimp this April and what designs did our Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video teams bring out for our clients? This month was a very eye-opening and exciting month for us and when you look at the designs and the industry trends accompanying them, you will know why.

So with no further ado, let’s get right into it. 

Design Recap: Landing Page Designs 

Advertising is becoming a tough nut to crack, especially digital advertising. With so much competition and pressure from changing algorithms, earning clicks has become a challenge for every marketer and brand. So it is no secret that most of the industry is now looking at tricks and techniques that can help them achieve the ROI they are looking for. 

If there has been one consistent piece of advice when it comes to advertising trends, it has been that the landing page matters as much as the advertising design when it comes to lead generation. You may have a brilliantly designed advertisement but if the landing page does not appeal to the customer, you cannot bring this lead home. 

So what is the industry consensus on landing page designs? Color seems to be the reigning champion as the one factor that can make or break the success of your landing page UI. 46% of consumers prefer businesses to use blue on web pages and do not want customers to use orange or yellow. In fact, blue and green are the two most preferred colors from an audience base that is looking for a reliable and trustworthy transaction. 

And what do you know, most of the landing pages we delivered in April followed this trend and businesses were more open to using blue than any other color.

This is not to say that every fleeting trend has to be followed but when the industry is giving such resounding support to a color, no harm in trying it out. 

And with Kimp’s unlimited graphic design subscription, you can experiment to your hearts’ content without spending a ton due to our flat monthly fee feature.

Design Recap: Logo Designs 

Logo designs have always been one of the most popular design categories at Kimp. Usually, logo designs are the hardest expense for a brand to manage because sometimes it feels like there is no upper limit to it. Businesses usually struggle to convey what exactly they are looking for when it comes to branding designs. So the options are either to struggle with iterations which means a growing bill or to settle for something you are not 100% happy with. 

But at Kimp, the story goes a little differently. Our subscriptions are for a fixed flat monthly fee and that includes branding design too. We start with a specific design brief format and our design teams provide multiple options and unlimited revisions until you are happy. Of course, our experienced design team does not need much to deliver a stunning branding design but the flexibility makes customers happy. 

We worked on a lot of logos in April as we usually do, and a few of the trends that stood out for us were:

• A dominance of blue logos as customers ride on the wave of blue color psychology to depict themselves as reliable, professional, and one with the big leagues (think Facebook, IBM, Twitter, and so on). We predicted this in our logo design trends roundup for 2022 and it looks like this is still going strong.

• Combination type logo marks or logos with a pictorial representation accompanying the brand name are also quite popular as you can see below. Brands want to leverage the power of visuals and unique typography to give their business a unique image in the market, and we are here for it completely! 

Design Recap: Blog Images 

As we mentioned before, with constantly changing algorithms, advertising is becoming extremely challenging for everyone in the business world. So many marketers are now returning to their roots and putting their eggs in the content marketing basket. And with good reason too. When you have a strong content marketing pipeline, nothing can stop you from building a faithful audience. 

SEO is one of the few tools that marketers have diligently used for many years now and they are still standing by it. Of course, SEO favors long-form content over other content types but in the world of social media dominance, it can be hard to sell that to the audience. 

Thankfully, visual aids come to the rescue here as marketing agencies supplement the impact of their blogs with unique, customized, and attractive blog images. Studies tell us that 94% of articles with blog images get higher page views than those without. And Kimp’s clients’ continued interest in developing unique images for their blogs tells us that there is a lot of merit to that study.

As you can see, Kimp clients are not stopping at designing a cover image or placeholder image for their blogs. These illustrations help break the monotony of long-form text while also helping the audience to visualize the complex concepts the blog speaks of. 

Of course, you can go with stock images but as you can see, customized images or illustrations speak louder and yield better results. 

Design Recap: Typography Experimentation 

When we did our annual review of trends, the font trends looked quite exciting to us. All the sources were pointing to the fact that 2022 is going to be the year for customized and experimental typography. Of course, that is a designer’s dream. It also solves a lot of problems for brands and marketers in terms of copyright, font selection to fit the brand personality, and so on. 

So imagine our excitement when the April month projects rolled in and we saw that many of these had the potential for typographic experimentations. Right from logo design to cover images, we saw that customers wanted something unique and the only way to deliver that was to give font experimentations a try.

As you can see below, Kimp got to experiment with fonts for: 

• Illustrated covers

• Packaging design

• Logo design

Typographic experimentations are not for everyone. If you are a traditional business, then our team would undoubtedly recommend something more traditional to suit your needs. But sometimes it is fun and exciting to create a design for a personality that would not fit the mold otherwise. 

Want to give it a whirl for your brand too? Start a free trial with Kimp to get started.

Design Recap: Social Media Designs 

How can we even think of a marketing design recap without talking about social media? If designs have such high importance in this world, it is because social media has improved brands’ and customers’ appetites for visual content. 

This is the medium of communication that proved to the world that working with visual aids can improve the impact of the message you are trying to convey. And once that took off, visual marketing became a thing. But what is happening in the world of social media designs currently? Is the power of visual aids still holding true? 

Yes, it is and this features regularly across all social media trend roundups. Studies tell us that social media posts with images have a 650% higher engagement than those without. This means even on social media, you need something like a photograph or an image to get your user’s attention. Specifically, on Facebook, when you post content with visual aids, customers engage 2.3 times more than usual (non-visual posts). 

Check out this Facebook post design by Kimp wherein the brand leverages the design to promote their product across demographics.

Irrespective of what the intention is – it can be a giveaway or a simple product post, it is the design that matters the most. No post can go without an accompanying design if you want it to succeed. 

Design Recap: Illustrations 

Another trend that we noticed in April is that brands and marketers are realizing the value of illustrations. We have long maintained that if the aim is to stand out in a competitive market, stock images and editing would just not be enough. You need a unique style that represents only you and can connect with the audience instantly. And illustrations fit this description to the T.

What used to be a tool that brands use in animated ads or only when they wanted to appeal to a younger demographic like Gen Z or Millennials is mainstream now. It is everywhere and they are replacing stock images where they have ruled till now. 

Yes, what other explanation would we have for our customers wanting to include illustrations instead of stock images of food items in their restaurant menu? And what a good decision it was, since it elevates the design and aesthetic of the menu design as you can clearly see below.

Illustrations also help you convey complex ideas and improve the impact of your landing page designs. Even in this simplistic landing page design, the addition of illustrations keeps the audience hooked till the end and helps you achieve your goals. 

If you are looking to include illustrations in your brand communication, developing a brand illustration may come in handy. 

Design Recap: Video Marketing 

If you work in marketing or own a business, you know how important video marketing is. And the biggest reason why you know it is because no one stops talking about it. Every platform that you may or may not be creating on is now prioritizing video. Social media platforms are releasing updates after updates to improve the video viewing experience for the audience. 

But this is still an untapped opportunity as many brands are still apprehensive about entering video-only platforms such as TikTok. Even on Facebook, less than 5% of businesses use video ads because of how complicated and strenuous they feel it is. 

Thankfully that is not the case for Kimp Clients. With the Kimp Video package, video marketing is now easily accessible to businesses of all sizes. They can create videos for their websites, blogs, social media channels, landing pages, emails, and so on. And brands need to have an omnichannel video marketing plan since Google is working on an updated search algorithm that redirects customers to videos and images rather than text.

Check out this video ad created by Kimp for one of our customers. It is a simple and faceless video ad but still manages to get the point across quickly and effectively. 

And Kimp is not shying away from creating videos for your YouTube channel either. In fact, to know more about YouTube video marketing, check out this video here: 

And if you want to dive into video marketing, get started with a Kimp Video subscription. 

Design Recap: Interactive Designs 

We are constantly speaking about the reduced attention spans in humans, but just speaking about that is not going to help anyone, is it? That is why marketers and designers have to think of something that can help circumvent the attention span issue. And interactive designs that engage the audience to snap out their attention issues is the way to do it. 

Static designs are not quite enough to make the impact you want. But videos can be expensive to incorporate into your marketing campaigns. Not to mention the fact that when you optimize videos for mobile viewing, the loss in quality is quite apparent. Especially if you are embedding them on email or landing pages designs. 

That is why Kimp created easy-to-load email designs and quick GIFs for our clients throughout the month of April. GIFs specifically are a huge hit and are used by brands in social media designs, emails, and so on. Of course, animated emails like you see below are also quickly catching on.

Some of the designs in this category by Kimp are: 

Creating simplistic GIFs is now possible within the Kimp Graphics + Video subscription. Kimp Graphics will handle the design component, meanwhile Kimp Video will take care of the animation. Given how beneficial they are to your campaign, we recommend signing up for this subscription! 

Design Recap: NFT Designs

If you are following the Kimp blog, you will know that the team has been working on a ton of NFT designs and completely loving it. So how can we not include them in our April recap? 

NFT is a very exciting space but it is also a space that a lot of businesses are finding difficult to navigate. And even for people exploring this budding platform as a source of investment, its design seems to be a challenge. So is it that only artists can launch NFTs? Not necessarily since with the power of white label design, customers can now create designs and hold complete ownership of them. 

And because we know how copyright and its surrounding issues work, having worked in this field for many years, our designers create the design from scratch or from legitimately licensed designs to keep things simple for you.

Beyond this, you would be interested to know that the NFT design requests that we have been handling are diverse as they come. Right from quirky illustrations to religious figures and even some Pop Culture inspired figures, we have done it all.

So what does it tell you as someone looking to enter the NFT space? No design is not NFT-worthy if you know your audience and are confident that you can build a community that will resonate with those designs. 

For a more detailed breakdown of NFT designs by Kimp, check our blog. You can also check how the NFTs sold for the highest amounts fare design-wise with this guide. 

If you have ideas that you are sure can kill it as NFTs and design is your only obstacle, get a Kimp Graphics subscription and get started on your vision right away!

Graphic Design and Video Design April Recap: Our Thoughts 

Sometimes when you are working away on the day-to-day, you fail to see the big picture. You do not link your everyday work with the impact it has on the industry and the marketing environment. But it definitely has an impact, and is tied to bigger themes, as this recap clearly shows. 

We are always grateful for the opportunities our clients present to us to be a part of this bigger picture as we help bring their designs to life. And on that note, it’s time to wind down the April recap and look ahead to what May brings us! 

If this recap has got you curious about what Kimp can do for you, sign up for our free trial today and get started!