Village Creative

Are you frustrated by your seeming inability to turn out decent looking reports, letters, brochures or other collateral for your business or home use? Do you feel like you’re always chasing the elusive “beautiful design”, but only to end up wishing you had a budget to hire a professional designer? Do you feel like you can’t ever “get it right?”

“Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.”
— Peter Bilak – Illegibility

Good graphic design is often viewed as something that’s only accessible or achievable by people who have earned an art or graphic design degree. Granted, talent and training shine, but I believe that just about anybody can become a better designer (I’m not saying they’ll become one of the best designers), through learning some simple concepts.

It’s like photography: anybody can point and shoot a camera, but if one learns a simple concept—the rule of thirds—their photos can make a drastic improvement.
So, in that vein, here are a few simple things you should know that will hopefully help you produce better designs, make you look more professional, and give your customers a better experience.

Graphic Design is Visual Communication

The purpose of design is to communicate an idea.
From AIGA’s Graphic Design: A Career Guide:

“Suppose you want to announce or sell something, amuse or persuade someone, explain a complicated system or demonstrate a process. In other words, you have a message you want to communicate. How do you “send” it? You could tell people one by one or broadcast by radio or loudspeaker. That’s verbal communication. But if you use any visual medium at all—if you make a poster; type a letter; create a business logo, a magazine ad, or an album cover; even make a computer printout—you are using a form of visual communication called graphic design.

“…Designers create, choose, and organize these elements—typography, images, and the so-called “white space” around them—to communicate a message.”

Stop thinking of Graphic Design as art; It can be very artistic, but only for the sake of communicating a message.

Which brings us to:

Know your message

It’s critical that you know what you’re trying to communicate through your design.
What does this have to do with making things look good? Well, think about it like giving a presentation or speech. If you don’t have a grasp on what your message is it won’t matter how well you can speak, how funny you are, or how interesting you try to make things. You’re going to be going down all kinds of rabbit trails, and ultimately you are wasting your listeners’ time.

It’s the same with a design project, your message is what you’re communicating through the product, and the design work is the vehicle that helps to communicate that message. If your design doesn’t support that message, it can look great and still not be effective.

And that’s the point of graphic design—to be effective. If you want to make nice art, that’s great, but take up painting. Don’t try to make your designs into artistic pieces just because you can. Make them artistic if that’s how you can visually communicate your message.

For example, let’s say you have to create a brochure for your nursing home. The graphic design of your brochure should enhance and help to communicate the message of the brochure, which is that you have an incredibly compassionate staff that makes their elderly clientele feel like their part of a family and well cared-for. You’re most likely not going to want to design your brochure with cutesy cartoony graphics, because, even though it may look good, won’t support the message you’re trying to communicate, and will instead make potential clients feel that they may be treated like kids.

Design on a grid

“Well designed grid systems can make your designs not only more beautiful and legible, but more usable.” – Mark Boulton

Designing on a grid can go a long way towards helping with great-looking and usable designs, especially for items such as forms, letters, and brochures.

There’s been a wealth of discussion on this topic already, so rather than re-write what’s already been said, here are some links to a few articles and tutorials on designing with a grid:

The Grid: An Invisible Framework
How to Design a Smart, Functional Form
Five simple steps to designing grid systems – Part 1

Photo by chotda

Plan your colors

Unique color schemes that work can be hard to come up with. If you don’t want to learn a bit about color theory you’re going to have a hard time, but my advice is once you pick a color scheme stick with it. Treat your color scheme as part of your brand. It should share colors with your logo, too.

Look at UPS. Their logo is brown. Their uniforms are brown. Their vehicles are brown. That color brown is virtually synonymous with the company. Your company can do that, too.

If your company colors are red and green, you should use those colors on your business cards, letterhead, brochures, etc.

Color tutorials and resources:

colr.org has a great feature in it’s array of color tools that allows you to choose or upload an image and extract colors directly from the image.
colourlovers.com, a community-based color site with thousands of searchable color palettes.
Adobe Kuler is an online color application that allows you to choose or build a color palette and then download it in a format compatible with your design software.
colorblender.com, a free online tool for color matching and palette design.
Wikipedia: Colour Theory

Use fewer fonts, but use them deliberately

Fonts are fun, aren’t they? But when you throw them around and use them piecemeal in your design work, it’s just saying “I don’t know how to use fonts properly!”

Choose two or three fonts to use and stick to them. A font for the headlines, one for the body text, and maybe one for accents such as pullquotes.

Font tutorials & resources:

Type Palettes
What’s the right typeface for text? – a free PDF from Before & After Magazine
Typography Rules, Typesetting Guidelines at About.com
Find free fonts at Fawnt.com or DaFont.com

Use images sparingly

Each image in your design should serve a specific purpose.

The overuse of clipart is a telltale sign of an amateur designer. Just because you can pick up a clipart library CD and have thousands of images on hand does not mean you should use them without careful planning.

If you’re going to use clipart, try to use images that carry the same graphic style, preferably created by the same artist, like a set from Ron and Joe.

A great technique is to use a single, high-resolution image, and crop sections of it for different parts of your design. A wonderful tutorial on this technique is available from Before & After Magazine.

Images tutorials and resources:

Stock.XCHNG, a free stock image site
Cuts & Caps from Briar Press, hundreds of quality free ornaments and initials from old letterpress specimen books.
Use Less Clip Art: Desktop Publishing Rules of Image Use

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Be consistent

Consistency is really important. I see many flyers, brochures, letters, etc. that have tons of flashy clipart images, lots of different fonts, wild colors, and inconsistent font sizes throughout.

You want your design to be consistent, but you also want all of your designs to carry a consistent image of your company.

Use the same font choices, color schemes, and logo placement locations across your letterhead, business cards, and other collateral. It’ll really help to unify your brand, and looks very professional.

In closing

This is definitely not an end-all list of rules, but hopefully these simple steps will help you turn your inconsistent and amateurish designs into professional, unified designs that enhance your brand and bring in more business.

Some other resources

Principles of design for desktop publishing
Ideabook.com tutorials
Before and After Magazine is a fantastic resource, and well worth the small subscription price. You can even buy back issues from them. Easy to understand design tips applied to practical, real-world examples will really help you learn great graphic design principles. I highly recommend it.

Happy designing!

• filed under: Tutorials