(image credit sainfoinc.com)
Designing is more than just booting up Adobe Photoshop and dressing up your text in a fancy font, and switching up the colours to match your business’s corporate colours. Designers will tell you that a good design is very carefully thought-out and planned. From the colour scheme to the placement of each element to the fonts used, everything is calibrated to a T!
If your business is fortunate enough to have someone with some solid design skills and an eye for visual aesthetics onboard the team, we say good for you!
Otherwise, you’d be much better off hiring a skilled and professional graphic designer to help you with your design needs. Our team at Decadence Design can help! It is so easy to go wrong with design that bad design is more common than you’d think. All it takes is a wrongly chosen font or a slip in design consistency for your brand’s image to go awry.
These are the 3 most common design mistakes design-amateurs tend to make without even realising it:
Fonts matter
Choosing the font for the design a flyer, a banner or other collaterals for your business is more important to the success of the design that you think. Different types of fonts have different strengths – Helvetica or Garamond is great for design that is more text-heavy due to how easy most people find these fonts to read; Bodoni is ideal for elegant headlines.
Many people make the mistake of randomly selecting a font based on personal preference and throwing a few choices on the design for variety. That usually does not work. Pairing fonts for visual symmetry and harmony is equally important in design and something that non-professional designers tend to overlook.
Overdesigning
A design pro will know and appreciate the beauty of “a little”. One of the traps that non-designers tend to fall into is overdesigning in the guise of making a design more complex and interesting. Trying to cram too many elements into a design cos the boss wants as accurate a representation as possible may sound like a good idea but it will result in a truly confusing, messy piece of work.
It is often easier to overdesign than design efficiently and simply. Like Mark Twain said, “Sorry I wrote such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one” – simple, effective and beautiful design ultimately takes more time, more effort and more skill.
Lack of consistency
Keeping your design elements and colours consistent throughout the whole suite of collaterals AND in-line with your business’s goals and overall corporate identity is crucial to maximising the budget you have set aside for design. The look and feel of your various images across platforms must remain essentially the same, of course with small tweaks here and there according to the medium.
For example, we at ENCE believe in walking the talk, so we not only rolled out our Chinese New Year related designs on our banners (check out our January post about how to incorporate Chinese New Year into your designs), we made doubly sure that our CNY banners were consistent, in terms of the overall design aesthetic and fonts used, with the rest of our collaterals and logos.
