THE IMPORTANCE OF VISUAL METAPHORS IN BRANDING

ABSTRACT

Visual metaphors help not only create a positive brand face but can also spoil it. To do this, it is important to understand how this tool is created, what it affects and how it works.

Keywords: design, brand, metaphors.

During the development of the brand, the company faces the problem of attracting customers. When studying the world, people primarily focus on vision. Unlike dogs, whose main assistant is the sense of smell, and the same dolphins, guided by the reflection of sounds from surfaces, people need visual signals from the outside world. Every year there is more content based on a beautiful picture. If in the life of a caveman, a riot of colors was a rare, but at the same time an attention-grabbing phenomenon, which often testified to a predator behind a bush or a ripe fruit, today there is so much visual noise that any bright signboard becomes only commonplace. Therefore, brands need to work not only with colorfulness, but also with meanings. However, images are a powerful form of communication, especially because artistic images can speak to a person without words. They work on a primitive, emotional level and are therefore more convincing. Before using any graphic symbols, companies should make sure that their idea will not offend any social groups and will not be perceived ambiguously [1].

To solve creative problems and apply them in practice, they use the approach of design thinking. The name corresponds to the activities of the designers themselves and focuses on their real work processes. However, this technique has gathered elements from doing business, architecture, and engineering. You can apply the design not only to the development of an innovative car, but even to ordinary everyday affairs in everyday life. Regardless of the scope of application, the principles of design thinking remain unchanged. At the beginning of thinking through the design, the specialist needs to emotionally tune in to the consumer and assume what real problems he may face, and most importantly, how the user can avoid them. The designer needs to show empathy to his clients to understand in depth what tasks the design should solve. Let's move on to systematization and analysis of the data collected in the process of empathy. All problems that users may encounter should be grouped according to similar characteristics. Then, based on these characteristics, you can create characters for the target audience to further simplify the process of generating ideas – solutions to specific problems. Next, the designer and his team need to brainstorm and think through all the non-obvious points that affect the solution of user difficulties. It is important to test all the collected ideas. Surely there were several solutions for each problem. Here it is important to choose the tool that will require minimal costs from you and at the same time allow the client to solve the problem intuitively easily. It is acceptable to go back to the previous stages to see if the most effective solution was missed [2].

Before considering visual metaphors, let's pay attention to the human thought process. There are two types of thinking: logical and imaginative. Logical or structural thinking allows us to perceive a single integral object as a group of disparate elements. For example, when a musician looks through a sheet of music, he perceives a melody as a set of notes. Figurative or gestalt thinking, on the contrary, helps to assemble parts into a specific object. For example, when we hear a song, we perceive it holistically, and not as a set of sounds. Objects that are perceived holistically are also called gestalts. Gestalts are innate. Usually these are objects that are perceived by all people in approximately the same way. Such gestalts include simple geometric shapes, colors, some simple head movements, etc. Sometimes gestalts are acquired throughout life, and they depend on the personal experience of everyone. For example, for a person with an allergy, chocolate will be a danger, and without it – a joy. Next, we list the rules for the designation of gestalts. Objects are perceived together if they are close to each other. All objects similar in various characteristics also form a single whole. Closed lines form separate shapes. Contiguity in time and space also indicates integrity [3].

Let's move on to metaphors. By them we mean the transfer of some phenomena to others. Let's consider three types of metaphors: nominative, figurative and cognitive. The nominative metaphor refers exclusively to the names of objects, there is no artistic value in it. A metaphor of this type only transfers the properties of one object to another on the principle of similarity. So, we can use the word "leg" to denote the leg of a chair, table, sofa, etc. A figurative metaphor covertly characterizes an object. It reflects the associations that a person receives through his feelings and combines them with real objects. For example, beautiful hair can be compared to pure gold. A cognitive metaphor creates an abstract concept. Often it is compiled not on the similarity of real objects, but on the attributed generality of phenomena or objects. For example, a small number of people can be designated as a handful of people [4].

A visual metaphor uses a graphical representation of an object to evoke an association or similarity. Visual metaphors contain only images and are found in art, advertising, film, and television. Visual metaphors use physical similarity to make something look like something else, or conceptual similarity, the ideas behind the images. The meanings or relationships created by such metaphors can help complement the brand's story, connect it with the audience or consumer.

In the modern world, people have begun to move more away from classical language metaphors and move to a newer and more attractive one, so metaphors appeared in design, advertising and branding in general. Now, people do not notice the use of various metaphors in social networks: menu items, settings, music – all this has its own display in the form of illustrations. Magnifying glass – search, pen – write, envelope – mail, all this is perceived as familiar, but very convenient and understandable [5].

To understand more precisely what a metaphor is in design; we can open various applications and consider them in detail. In our case, let's take the Telegram application. Let's start with the main icon, which is depicted in the form of a paper airplane, which means sending messages at the same speed as an airplane fly, and a paper one, since anyone can send it. The cog button is settings, because it manages the entire process of the mechanism and the like.

How to use metaphors in design? Each metaphor helps us to understand the essence of a certain brand and what it wants to convey to us. When we are faced with the task of presenting a product that is not clear to the consumer, it will be easiest to give an analogy or metaphor that will be clear to the common man. There are three main design metaphors: product (cake, phone, pencil), place (exhibition, concert, election) and brand. All of them create the image of the company, both good and bad, so it is very important to use metaphors correctly in design.

Let's take the example of JBL advertising, which tries to convey to the consumer that their product (headphones) is not only of good quality and with a beautiful design, but also helps to distract from the global noise that worries everyone. This is a product metaphor that attracts to the product not only for the quality, but also for what emotion and idea a particular product carry [6].

It should be borne in mind that such design metaphors are very difficult to come up with, and if it is done incorrectly, then we can bring a loss to the company, so it is worth studying the methods of generating such ideas. There are the main seven ways:

1) The idea generator. Take the example of a cart, it consists of a body, nails, wheels, and a horse. To create a metaphor, we need to replace all the real components with those that are inherent in the message of your brand. For example, eco-products. That is, the body of the cart can now consist of cabbage, wheels of potatoes, and a hare can carry the cart.

2) Mind map. The designer creates a mind map that prescribes all the functions of the product we want to sell. Next, you supplement this map with various images and as a result we get not only a beautiful picture, but a full description of the product.

3) Associations. You write out the words associated with the brand, and then build an image (advertisement) based on the received list of words.

4) The image of language metaphors. For example, a flight of fantasies, you depict an airplane wing in the form of a book, which is a direct image of advertising on canvas.

5) The use of objects not in the Web space, for example ceramics or sculpture, which will later be transferred to the screen in the form of a photo.

6) Synesthesia – perception of the surrounding world by all senses. That is, you depict the product you are interested in under the prism of a certain part of the body.

7) And the last is the personalization of objects, that is, their humanization, for example, live vegetables [7].

Based on all the above, we can draw certain conclusions. Firstly, when creating a brand, we should pay attention not only to the colorfulness of images and advertising, but also to the meaning of the brand to the public, because this will directly affect the image of the company and the salability of products. Secondly, to create unique visuals for a modern person, it is necessary to develop design thinking, which in the future will help to assemble incompatible objects into a single whole picture. To do this, it is worth not only developing independently, but also brainstorming with other specialists, which will later lead to unique ideas. Do not forget about what metaphors are and how they affect not only the language, but also the industry of various brands. They help to transfer a complex meaning to a more pleasant and understandable for the eyes of a simple person. And we can create new design metaphors using seven methods that serve as generators of design solutions when creating visual metaphors for a particular brand. If we adhere to all these rules, we will be able not only to create the best brand identities, but also to develop our own thinking, which will undoubtedly help in further work on projects.

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