6 Design Tips for the Non-Designer

1. Mind your color choices

Everyone sees color differently. Color combinations that look great to you might make it hard to read for others. A good rule of thumb is to make sure you choose colors with the right amount of contrast. For instance, don’t use light-gray text on a white background. Any colored text on a black background is always a bad idea. Here’s a handy tool that’ll help you test your color choices using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards.

To ensure the colors you’re using look good together, refer to your company’s brand guidelines. They should include a color palette put together by a seasoned designer. No brand guidelines? Check out coolors.co to look through trending color palettes or generate your own.

2. Font sizes

Not everyone has stellar vision, so make sure to keep font sizes above 16px for web projects and above 12pts for print or reading materials. One thing to keep in mind is all fonts are different, so you might have to make it bigger depending on the font choice. And depending on what you’re designing, font size might need to be larger to quickly catch your audience’s attention.

3. Font choices

There are so many options to choose from - don’t stick to default fonts like Arial or Times New Roman. And absolutely NEVER EVER use Comic Sans (unless you’re channeling the ‘90s like we did with Zima’s relaunch). An excellent resource is Google Fonts. You’ll find a variety of free, beautifully designed fonts that work well for any project.

4. Keeping up with trends

If you want to make sure your project is a hit, do some research on the latest design trends. Here are a few examples of what’s trending right now:

• Diffused shadows
• Monochrome color palettes (variations of the same color)
• Soft gradients

5. Graphic choices

Imagery can make or break your design. It can help tell a story if you choose the right photo. Don’t use generic stock images that show people posing or giving a thumbs-up. Pexels and Unsplash are two great resources that have a vast selection of royalty- and attribution-free images.

6. Whitespace, AKA negative space

There are times you want to make sure everything fits on one page or one slide, so you cram everything on there and call it a day. But not so fast! Whitespace is extremely important in any design and often overlooked. It allows your audience to easily take in information and make sense of it. When things are cramped and cluttered, you risk the chance of overwhelming the reader. Don’t just take my word for it. This study showed that adding whitespace increased comprehension by almost 20%. So take some time to cut out anything that’s unnecessary or go crazy and add an extra page.

And that’s it! There are many more tips I could go over, but you have work to do. Go on and crush that design project!

Do you have a bigger project at hand, like putting together an infographic or animation? Our team is ready to produce content ready to use on all your channels. Want to know more? Contact us if you’re ready to discuss your content strategy.