Ever notice that the best designs tend to have beautiful colors? That’s no accident. Choosing a great color palette is one of the keys to a great design. Now before you cringe at the thought of choosing your own colors, you don’t have to. Using a site like ColourLovers will give you access to millions of beautiful color palettes.
Ideally, you want to limit yourself to 1 or 2 fonts. This keeps you from having to worry about tons of If you’re going to use multiple fonts, use one for the header and another for the body.
This term comes from the copywriting world, but it’s equally applicable here. A “Swipe File” refers to instances of good copy that copywriters see. In our case, it’ll mean instances of good design that you see.
No, not blank out in the sense of spacing out. Rather, don’t be afraid to leave blank, white space in your design. Sometimes, as they say, less really is more. If you want a lesson in how to utilize white space, look at any marketing image created by Apple.
This helps to keep design elements in a presentable order, regardless of their differing sizes. Proper alignment is an easy way to give your images a sophisticated and professional look.
Icons are like black pepper. They can be sprinkled on top of whatever design you’re cooking up. And the icons will add extra spice to your design, ensuring that it “tastes” great.
Rules, what rules? The ones you set for yourself. These probably won’t be specific rules. But rather cases across your design where you use a particular set of colors, lines, textures, etc. If you’re set on that choice, don’t turn around and do something contrary to it. Stay consistent with your “design rules”, to ensure consistency in your image overall.
If you’re working with multiple designs across an ad campaign, website, or other project – it may be easiest for you to just rinse and repeat. That is, copy your design and then just swap out the elements you need changed. That ensures the format is the same, even as you change the content.
You can add plenty of variety, while still keeping things feeling consistent. The key is to use text from a single font “family”.
Using contrasts helps to add “attitude” to your design, as well as make certain elements stand out. There are plenty of ways to generate contrasts too. You could use contrasting colors, fonts, or even contrast amounts of space between items in your design.
We put this tip mid-way through the list of tips to mirror where planning usually falls in most people’s graphic design process.
Rather than having planning as the first essential step, the average non-designer only begins to think seriously about their plans for a design AFTER they’re well into the design process.
Whenever you have a body of text (i.e. paragraphs), each line should have no more than approximately 30-40 characters. That includes spaces too, so choose carefully.
