“Mind-catching” is not [or not yet] in any American/English dictionary. We have “eye-catching,” “mind-altering,” or “mind-reading” but not “mind-catching.” Although the term is fabricated, it is pretty self-explanatory.
Mind-catching design is more like a motto to me. That is, design is more than eye-catching; it’s about mind-catching. While eye-catching implies beauty, mind-catching means beauty + memorable and powerful content in a complete package. While eye-catching may lean toward creativity in general, mind-catching is more about strategic creativity.
A mind-catching design can catch its target audience’s attention, possibly stay in their minds, and later may even alter their [buying] behaviors or decision making process. In other words, a mind-catching design no matter what it is – a web page, an ad, or a sales sheet – has in itself all elements of AIDA. It can attract Attention, create Interest, arouse Desire, and solicit Action from the target audience.
Mind-catching = Eye-catching + Strategically Powerful Message
What distinguishes mind-catching from eye-catching is the strategically powerful message.
The power of the message lie both in the verbiage itself and in the visual factors of how the message is presented such as the type face, colors, text or image position/direction in relation to other elements, negative and positive spaces of the whole design, images used…Without the strategically powerful message, your target audience may look but don’t see, and even if they see the design, they’ll be more likely to forget it in a few minutes later.
“Why?” Simply because we are now living in an overcommunication environment; everybody is being bombarded consciously or sub-consciously with all types of information from random to targeted infomercials, news, emails, phone calls, communications at work, schools, or at homes… The brain itself tends to be overloaded; as a result, to help it get back to its equilibrium, the brain and thus your eyes learn to filter extraneous information out. Consequently, lots of times we look but don’t really see, and we see but don’t really remember.
Strategically powerful message
Just having a great product doesn’t guarantee success for your business. The question is how you’re going to communicate your product features and benefits to your prospects; how you’re going to differentiate your product from and position it against your competitors’.
Similarly, just having a great content or great design for your website doesn’t guarantee your site will sell. The question is how you’re going to present your great content and develop/code it into a website that will call for more actions from your target audience and be search-engine friendly at the same time.
Mind-catching Design will work with you all the way from the beginning to the completion of the project or even after that with its overall competitive analysis and detailed search engine analysis to make sure that your web design or graphic design works will have the high impact strategically powerful messages, will stand out from the competition, and will sell.