In a world that is becoming increasingly connected, the need for cultural sensitivity in design is becoming more crucial for developing successful international branding strategies. Graphic designers must consider the importance of cultural context and understand how to differentiate design based on the intended audience’s culture.
Understanding the Importance of Cultural Context
Cross-cultural branding is a brand strategy that focuses on using cultural awareness in design to maintain meaning and relevance for audiences of diverse cultural backgrounds. Global branding that thoroughly accounts for cultural influences on design is vital to successful cross-cultural communications because the context of the creator and the context of the audience significantly impact the intended and interpreted meanings of any visual design. If the designer and audience exist in vastly different cultural, social, political or historical contexts, then the interpreted meaning can become lost in translation.
To avoid offensive design, misleading imagery, or inaccurate translations, extensive cultural research should be incorporated into your global design strategies.
Avoiding Offensive or Misleading Imagery
When designing for a global audience, focus on using inclusive imagery that incorporates images of a variety of people (different races, genders, ages, and body types). However, be careful not to represent individuals in stereotypical roles that could be offensive to certain groups.
What is considered normal or polite language, behavior, and interaction varies greatly between cultures. Failing to understand and honor cultural nuance in international graphic design can result in awkwardness or designs that don’t resonate with your audience (even potentially offending a cross-cultural audience).
To better understand cultural nuances and regional preferences, designers should consider multiple dimensions of cultural difference. The world-renowned Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede worked with a team to create a six-dimensional model of national culture that defined six categories of cultural differences, measured and mapped around the world.
Geert’s 6-D Model of National Culture includes:
- Collectivism vs. individualism – This dimension measures whether members of a particular region place more value on individuals (independence) or collective groups (interdependence).
- Power distance – This dimension measures how much cultural members expect and accept an unequal distribution of power.
- Femininity vs. masculinity – This dimension measures the degree to which a culture deems the use of force as socially acceptable. Additionally, it takes into consideration the openness of emotional expression across genders.
- Uncertainty avoidance – This dimension measures the degree to which the members of a culture tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty.
- Long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation – This dimension measures whether the members of a culture are more future-oriented (long-term planning) or past/present-oriented (short-term planning).
- Indulgence vs. restraint – This dimension measures whether the members of a culture place more value on indulgence (satisfying human desires) or restraint (abstinence). Indulgent cultures tend to be more open, while more restrained cultures adhere more closely to societal norms and traditions.
Researching international audiences and where they fall within the six dimensions will help designers create more successful cultural adaptation strategies. Designers can consider these categories with respect to their audience when designing brand and marketing imagery to ensure seamless, respectful, and positive international marketing.
Designers must also be mindful of the fact that common symbols can have vastly different meanings within different cultural contexts. One of the most well-recognized examples of differing regional symbolism is the spiral. Found within nature, and one of the oldest symbols worldwide, spirals and their many variations are found throughout North America, Africa, China, Peru, and within Neolithic societies in Europe and the Middle East. For some, it represents the birth, life, and rebirth cycle, symbolizing growth throughout our lifetimes. For others, it represents the world’s necessity for change yet emphasizes life’s repeated patterns, allowing us to revisit past issues once more from a more mature and evolved perspective. Being aware of exactly how a symbol will be interpreted within a culture and the larger implications surrounding it is crucial to properly convey your desired message.
The Role of Color in Different Regions
Color is one of the most powerful elements of visual storytelling and design. The neuroscience behind color influences consumer behavior as people naturally assign subjective meanings to different colors as they respond to them in different ways. For example, a person could respond to the color red:
- Biologically, associating it with a bodily response like fear or an emotion like passion.
- Personally, connecting it to the memory or feeling associated with certain experiences (like wearing red lipstick or riding in a fast, red convertible).
- Culturally, associating it with well-being in some Eastern cultures or with communist rule in others.
Before choosing colors for global branding strategies, designers should understand that culturally informed color symbolism varies from region to region. Certain colors might have positive connotations in the West, negative connotations in the East and vice versa.
For primary branding elements (such as logos and website colors), it may be safest to work with colors, like blue, that primarily have positive connotations across cultures.
Language and Typography Considerations
While design primarily focuses on visual storytelling, it often incorporates language, using a careful selection of typography to ensure an attractive look and easily readable text.
To achieve clear cross-cultural communication with mindful design, one must choose a multilingual typography that works well with Latin characters and symbols in addition to other relevant writing systems. Depending on the part of the world your designs will reach, these may include:
- Cyrillic in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia
- Arabic script in the Middle East
- Hangul in Korea
- Chinese characters
- Japanese Kanji
- Katakana
- Hiragana
Key Strategies for Tailoring Designs
Designers can take a systematic approach to global branding with the following strategies:
Conducting Market Research
The first step in a cross-cultural design project should be researching your target markets to ensure you are aware of the cultural nuances, values, and preferences. Take in successful local marketing strategies to help inform your own designs. Also consider the language differences that might impact your design choices as well.
Creating Flexible Design Systems
Based on your findings, create a flexible design system that you will be able to adapt to different markets. The system should include reusable elements, modular components, dynamic digital design elements, and clear guidelines. Your design system should allow you to generate multiple iterations of a brand identity that feel consistent but flexible enough to accommodate differing regional preferences.
Piloting and Testing
Once you have a design, the best way to know if it will be successful is to test it. You can release your designs to a limited audience, do A/B testing, use a heat map, or conduct feedback surveys. Be open to the results and listen to the feedback you receive. Then, continue editing and adjusting your design until you’ve achieved an optimal response.
Localization Best Practices
Ensure your content is thoroughly localized by adapting its every aspect to the intended audience. This might mean honoring cultural, legal, or linguistic nuances or being mindful of more obvious adjustments, such as changing the way you display the date and time or adjusting units of measurement and currency.
Collaborating With Local Experts
When designing for global markets, it’s worth hiring a local expert to help ensure you get your translations right. While direct translations might function fine in similar languages (such as translating from English to a Category I language), they likely won’t work well in languages that differ greatly (such as translating English to a Category IV language).
A local expert can help you better understand the nuances of translation, local idioms, and colloquialisms in addition to helping you navigate the cultural conventions of visual storytelling and symbolism.
Managing Brand Consistency
Brand recognition is one of the main goals of business branding — and consistency is vital to recognition. Managing brand consistency while staying respectful, relevant, and on-message can be challenging with a global audience. To maintain consistency, select universal symbols and more positively associated colors for your primary branding materials so that you can achieve consistency throughout your global design strategy.
Adjusting Visual Hierarchy and Layout
Depending on the languages and alphabets your designs will be presented in, designers must work with differing translations in mind. A two-inch tagline in English might need five inches in another language. These differences can have a considerable impact on the visual hierarchy and layout of your designs.
Digital design should be dynamic so that it can accommodate translations. Designers can also create completely separate materials for different regional audiences. It is essential for designers to note which languages are written from right to left and which are written from left to right. This will affect designs substantially, requiring designers to create virtually mirrored designs to achieve the same impact with different audiences.
In addition, designers should account for regional preferences regarding content density. While members of most Western cultures are used to navigating designs with light content density and plenty of negative space, members of many Eastern cultures are accustomed to ingesting much more content-dense designs with little negative space. Considering and adjusting for these differences in your layout will ensure you’re designing in a format that makes sense for your audience’s cultural context.
Tools and Resources for Global Design
Overwhelmed by the amount of information and research required to create successful global design strategies? Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and services designed to help graphic designers reach an audience that extends beyond their regional borders.
Translation and Localization Platforms
A quick internet search turns up countless translation and localization platforms powered by humans and/or machines. These platforms are designed to help marketers and designers translate their copy and adapt designs for a diversity of cultural contexts. The platform you choose will vary depending on your design creation budget and the degree of difference between your own culture and language and those of your audience.
Data-Driven Insights
Before launching your designs in a different region, be sure to create mechanisms for collecting, reporting, and analyzing data. Many digital marketing tools include built-in data analysis, and you can use this information to evaluate the performance of your designs in different regions. You can then make data-driven changes to your designs and retest them for continuous improvement.
Royalty-Free and Culturally Diverse Image Libraries
Designers have access to several royalty-free image libraries that are stocked with culturally diverse images. A few of the most popular libraries to visit include:
- Burst
- Better Allies
- Canva
- Creative Commons
- FreeImages
- Gratisography
- iStock
- Library of Congress
- Nappy
- Pexels
- Pixabay
- Unsplash
- WOCinTech
Real-World Examples and Case Studies
If you’re looking for a guidepost to improve your cross-cultural designs, then some of the most successful global brands and their global marketing strategies could help show you the way.
Successful Multinational Brands
- Coca-Cola – Coca-Cola satisfies the thirst of more than three billion consumers in 37 markets around the globe. Their global marketing strategy maintains a strong brand identity and relates to individuals across cultures by focusing their marketing strategies on telling stories about universal human emotions and connections.
- McDonald’s – Serving more than 30 international markets around the world, McDonald’s customizes its products based on the regions it serves in addition to creating culturally relevant marketing and developing digital experiences to engage users around the world.
- Apple – Despite cultural differences in aesthetic preferences, Apple has embraced the look of sleek modernism with simple designs while leveraging an intuitive universal user experience design to tap into diverse international markets.
- Starbucks – Starbucks treats each of its markets around the globe as its own independent audience. It develops unique marketing and design strategies for each market along with culturally inspired products.
Emerging Market Innovators
- Gojek (Southeast Asia) – Like Apple, Gojek relies on an intuitive user experience to create a globally attractive platform. The tech company rebranded in 2019 with a simple logo, enabling it to appeal to a broader global market.
- M-Pesa (Kenya) – A growing mobile payment system tailored to meet the unique cultural needs of individuals living in emerging markets, M-Pesa is currently available in Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- NuBank (Brazil) – Not yet available in the United States, Brazil’s NuBank capitalized on a significant need (for uncomplicated, accessible, and inexpensive banking options) and expanded the digital bank throughout Latin American markets.
- Paytm (India) – A digital payment platform launched in 2010, Paytm boasts more than 130 million users and an impressive list of investors from around the world, such as Silicon Valley Bank, Alibaba Group, and Ant Financials.
Start Your Cross-Cultural Design Journey at RMCAD
Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design allows students to start their global design journey from any location in the world. With degree programs available either on-campus or online, you can earn your Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design to elevate your art while learning how to combine digital art with business for success in the present world. You’ll learn about the history of graphic design and how it informs contemporary graphic design trends to adapt your designs for contemporary life and a global audience.
To learn more about our graphic design programs or our enrollment process, we welcome you to take the first step toward your future in design by requesting information today.
