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What is Emotive Design?

What is Emotive Design?

Emotive design is a component of emotive branding that engages people in a focused way that strives to evoke the specific feelings the brand seeks to own.

Using color, lines, shape, form, texture, light – and nothingness – designers create both passive and interactive experiences that resonant with the brand’s emotional space.

Emotive design is not overtly emotional design. Operating at a subtle and subconscious level, these design cues work to reinforce and enhance other dimensions of the way people interact with the brand.

From the highly tangible experience of using a product to the fleeting, coincidental exposure to a marketing message – emotive design works in the background: setting the stage of meaning, wrapping the package of feelings and reinforcing the unique nature of the emotive brand.

As such, emotive design shapes virtually the entire journey people take with the brand, from the moment they first meet the brand through every moment they will interact with the brand.

When people are exposed to a brand’s emotive design, they see colors, shapes and lines; but they feel something special, they feel something unique, they feel something that is meaningful to them.

They feel the brand’s emotional space; the design amplifies the feelings; the meaning is compounded; the brand and the person are more firmly bonded; as a result the emotive brand stands apart in both the market and in the hearts of the people important to the brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.


1 January 2015 Jerry Holtaway

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