Any skilled graphic designer will tell you creativity takes more than faith, trust, and a basic ‘formula’. Instead, it requires expertise and adherence to graphic design principles. This blog looks at some important and foolproof graphic design principles.
Know Your Brand Voice and Know Your Audience
Professional graphic designers generating marketing assets must review brand guidelines. Knowing your brand voice and target audience well will help you connect and use the two together. Be consistent throughout all design elements, emulating your brand every step. What message do you want your brand to convey? Have you nailed your tone of voice, and is it used throughout all design aspects? These are crucial principles to factor into graphic design but are often overlooked. Knowing the brand and audience will help you produce something clients will adore.
Give Your Client Options
One design idea isn’t enough. When feasible, prepare and present three options, and always put the client first. Listen to them and incorporate all elements they have mentioned in their brief, but do not be afraid to propose new ideas. You might just hit the nail on the head, and they will be grateful for the input.
Use Simple Colours
Although you have a full-colour palette, it’s best to avoid using all of them. The recurrence of a few colours in graphic design can make the final product more cohesive and appealing. The brand guidelines should specify these colours. Keep it simple when choosing a palette. Limit key colours to 2-3. As tempting as it may be to splash vibrancy, keep to the brand specs.
Avoid Colour Clashing
The use of colour theory can help or hurt a design. Avoid colours with vibrating boundaries — this happens when two colours clash, and the edges create a sense of motion, unless there is a specific purpose to create discordance. Although this may produce an eye-catching result, it is not always good.
Enjoy White Space
These elements can include text, images, icons, and other graphics. Despite its name, white space doesn’t necessarily have to be white; it can be any colour, pattern, or even a background image, as long as it’s relatively free of visual clutter. It’s a space that lets your other design elements breathe. Try increasing line spacing and see what a difference it makes to the page. Think of it as the breathing room for the elements on your page. Just as silence enhances music, white space allows the design elements to stand out and be more easily perceived.
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