Brain to Brand: How Psychology Shapes Visual Design

We’ve all done it. We pick up or click on some ‘thing’ at some store and consider a purchase solely on the packaging, slick product design, or simply because we like the color scheme. We often don’t even realize we do it or more importantly, why we do it, it’s just part of the consumer experience. This reactionary response to visual stimuli is part of being human. Our psychological and cultural experiences shape how we interact with the world around us, making design a highly interpretative, yet wildly influential part of our lives.

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By Kelli Binnings, Founder and Chief Brand Strategist at Build Smart Brands

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The psychology of design, however, goes beyond consumer experiences. It has the power to simplify complex ideas in a more accessible and memorable way, making our information-seeking efforts faster and our memory recall sharper through visual cues, graphics, and environmental experiences. Think about the transportation, medical, construction, or even banking industries and how they use design to guide us with visual stimuli and information hierarchies. With our brains processing visual information roughly ‘60,000 times faster than text,’ designers are uniquely positioned to cut through the ever-present environmental noise we so frequently find ourselves in.     

What we see, feel, and understand about design is derived from how we process and interpret information through our senses. While visual stimuli may be our strongest, our sense of touch, smell, and sound contribute a large part to our interpretive experiences. We’re constantly taking in information, determining if it’s useful or worth remembering, and making decisions based on what we feel or believe to be true. The crazy part is this ‘stimuli to response time’ occurs within a matter of milliseconds, making successful design a whisperer of influence and curated behavior. We can likely all agree, that brands like Apple, Google, and Amazon have perfected this through their intuitive user experiences and minimalist design choices. 

The fact is our individual experiences and psychological needs shape how we interact with brands and the visual design that sells them. Whether it’s shopping at IKEA, navigating the underground, or deciding to buy a product, we filter everything through the underlying emotional goals and perceptual experiences that drive us to act. These aesthetically pleasing, visual encounters activate our brain's reward system, giving us a rush of dopamine and other positive emotional responses, connecting our desires and appreciation for form with our purpose and need for functionality.

This neurological approach to design helps us connect our thoughts to our emotions, making it an extremely powerful tool in creative execution. By understanding how aesthetics influences the brain, brands can (and have been able to) design experiences that grab our attention, emotionally engage us, strengthen our memory, and satisfy our pleasures. It’s no wonder we gravitate towards these ‘things,’ we’re being called to them.  

*To make this a little more visually appealing, here are a few noteworthy realities about neuroaesthetics and the psychology of visual design.

Psychology and design is where science meets art; it’s the intersection of form and function at its finest. Designing for the way our brains process and respond to visual stimuli, enables designers to turn creativity into a strategic playground that resonates, influences, and moves the audiences they’re designing for. Consciously or subconsciously, designers and creatives borrow these psychological principles to create unique visual experiences that attract attention, engage audiences, and most importantly, inspire us to act. Neuroaesthetics and the psychology of design help brands go beyond surface-level interactions and into high-impact, visually stimulating experiences that encourage cognitive and emotional responses, inspiring trust, loyalty, and meaning within their viewing audiences. Whether it’s color, texture, form, or composition, our psychology influences our responses, preferences, and behavior toward what we see. When we understand the processes at play in how we see, we can shape what we see. That’s the power of psychology in visual design.