If you’re a bank today, you might be thinking about a rebrand. And if you’re thinking about a rebrand, it’s impossible to avoid the issue of design. Let’s face it: good design is important, but unless you’re a designer, you might have trouble articulating precisely what makes a bank’s website or mobile app visually appealing. Is it the imagery? Or is it the use of particular colors and shading?

But before you consider edgy designs and beautiful pictures, designers say, your new site has to be mobile-optimized.

“You’re seeing a higher and higher percentage of web visits are via a smart device, so if your website isn’t responsive, it’s going to take too long to download and they’re just going to go to somebody else’s website,” said Madeline Anderson-Balmer, director of digital marketing at the Massachusetts-based advertising firm McDougall-Duval.

That also means that older styles that have text and hyperlinks tightly squished together aren’t going to resize well when viewed on a mobile phone, so your links should be what Anderson-Balmer calls “fat-finger friendly.” And since consumers likely aren’t doing extensive research on their smartphones, your copy should be concise and “built with the sales funnel in mind,” she said.

But when it comes to creating a website that really pops, Mia Thurlow, creative director at McDougall-Duval, said that she sees the same challenges over and over in her work with community banks and credit unions.
“How do you make them all unique? A lot of the messaging, especially from credit unions, is community-based. How do you differentiate community-based on one versus another?” she said. “And for us, how do you make our look work financial yet friendly? A lot of them are smaller banks, so you don’t want them to look like Bank of America. You want it to have your hometown feel.”

That means Thurlow’s work might find her giving a small makeover to a credit union’s logo or traveling north to New Hampshire, where she could spend a day taking photos of mountains and small town scenery for a client’s new website.

Michael Tiedemann, creative director at 451 Marketing in Boston, is emphatic on at least one point: no stock imagery.

“It’s okay to start with pictures, but I try to avoid stock imagery,” he said. “Stock photos, when they first became very accessible to designers, there was such a flood of it because of how accessible it was. It was kind of cool and new and it gave smaller clients a higher quality of imagery than they used to have.”

But now, Tiedemann says, stock photos are everywhere, and if you’re using them in your own materials, he’s pretty sure that your customers are going to recognize them from somewhere else.

“The fact is that when we see things we recognize, we often shut down,” he said. “That’s a signal to our brain that this is not new information and we don’t need to pay attention. You have to be really careful about the imagery that you use.”

The way Tiedemann sees it, good design is more important than ever because increasingly, we use heuristics, or shortcuts – a stereotype or rule of thumb might be a good example – to make decisions.

“We’re relying on shorthand decision making to evaluate the businesses we do business with,” he said. “And [your audience is] making decisions about where to put [their] money – that’s why it’s so significant.”

Thinking About The Big Picture

Designers who work with banks and credit unions say that it’s really about the bigger picture. First, you need to have a good idea and you have to think about how your target audience will be navigating your website and in what context. A landing page to your website might be tailored toward the customer looking for a transaction of some sort, while your “About Us” or “Newsroom” page will necessarily be tailored toward a different sort of audience.
“For me, a well designed anything starts with an idea. Otherwise it’s just graphic blandishment. When you have a concept or an idea, everything that supports that idea just falls out of it,” Tiedemann said.

And Thurlow says, “You need to really think about, more than the design almost, how you’re going to navigate through your site, and your design should follow that. Make it look friendly and simple and clean, yet serious.”
Besides original photos, Tiedemann also recommends clean design and typography and flat, full-bleed imagery with a singular focus.

But above all, designers say, it’s your brand that should count.

“In the banking and finance sectors, brand matters. When you’re talking about design, that becomes an extension of what that brand stands for,” Tiedemann said. “Whatever the design is, it does have to express that brand.”