The power of visual communication jumped into the popular press during the 2008 presidential campaign. As a junior senator embarking on his first presidential bid, Barak Obama faced a problem similar to that of many start-up companies: how to capture the attention of his audience and create enough ethos in a short span of time to earn their business, or in this case their votes. One solution he chose to use was a corporate visual identity that received widespread praise for its simplicity and rhetorical effectiveness. Yet Obama’s experience is probably not the norm. Many entrepreneurs don’t have the resources for professional help and instead create their visual identities on their own.
This presentation reports on the results of a research study with a diverse group of entrepreneurs from a mid sized Midwestern city regarding how they created corporate visual identities. These results demonstrate that the entrepreneurs make decisions about typography, layout, color, etc. in an informational void. Instead of conducting research and performing audience analysis, typical tasks described in most textbooks, they developed their visual identities based upon trial and error, personal preference, and even the capabilities of software on hand. The entrepreneurs understood the value of the visual identity as a persuasive and informative form of corporate communication but we not always able to implement their designs consistently or create documents that used of basic principles of visual rhetoric.