We’re writing this list for all the content creators and business owners who can’t afford to pay a professional designer and non-designers on a team where designers are always too busy to help. Whether designing a new logo, creating social media posts or building websites and graphics, non-designers may struggle with creating designs like a professional. However, if you implement the five design tips below when creating your Facebook ads, website, logo, and marketing, you’ll be creating impactful designs for your business in no time!
1. Create A Style Guide For The Business
Creating a style guide for your company should be the first place to start. The style guide consists of fonts, colours, logos, and other helpful tips when creating content. By sharing this guide with the entire team, you can guarantee that your designs look cohesive. Here are the elements that go into a business style guide:
- A library of fonts.
- A colour palette, complete with the hex, CMYK, and RGB codes for each colour.
- A variety of brand logo(s) to choose from.
- Brand assets and photos that are regularly used in designs.
- Relevant instructions on how/when to use specific colours, fonts, sizes, etc.
2. Use Free Tools That Are Easy To Grasp
If you didn’t go to design school or spend hundreds of hours inside Photoshop or InDesign, you likely find it challenging to produce impactful designs at scale due to the technical skills needed. Lucky for you, there are free tools on the internet that have prebuilt templates, colour palettes and technical design tools to help you produce professionally designed assets. Here are some of our go-to sites:
- Canva.com: An online design and publishing tool that is filled with all the templates you need for designing assets across social media, websites, newsletters and more.
- Colourlovers, Adobe Color CC, and Colorblendy. These sites will help you build a palette containing a few colours that work well together.
- Removal.ai to remove backgrounds from images automatically, or ti create a transparent background
3. Use Only Good Quality Images.
Marketing designs are very visual, so images also help a design stand out besides the colour and fonts used. If you have someone in the office or on the team with experience using cameras, you can plan for the type of images your brand usually needs and conduct a photo shoot with the rest of the team or hire freelancers to pose for you. If you don’t have someone in-house, there are websites like unsplash and pexels that have an endless amount of free, high-quality images to choose from.
4. Typography 101
The font you use in a design can change perception instantaneously and make the difference between capturing someones attention or not. The rule of thumb with font in design is to balance readability and style. Stylised fonts are better for large header text, while body text is more readable with traditional fonts. Don’t go overboard with fonts, either. Stick with a maximum of two to three fonts per graphic. Any more, and you’ll have trouble creating a cohesive design.
5. Reduce clutter
Clutter is the number one thing you should focus on to make more beautiful looking designs. Remember, to reduce clutter, follow these principles:
- Align elements and use a grid. Even a slight misalignment can contribute to a design feeling cluttered. Elements look randomly placed and not harmonious when they’re not aligned with each other.
- Limit the number of colours in your design and use a complementary colour palette. A rainbow of colours creates a feeling of chaos in a design.
- Add whitespace in design (the margins and padding around elements and space between text and letters) makes your words more readable, interfaces less chaotic, and designs cleaner.
And there you go! If you have followed all these steps while creating your next design, you’ll have a professional-looking design by industry standards.
