Design For The Non-Designer

In my opinion, it's good to have a basic knowledge of a variety of fields, regardless of what your interests or career is in. And for the most part, we do try to educate ourselves in many different ways. I'm no doctor, but I try to know the basics on health and nutrition; I'm also no woodworker, but I know my way around tools and simple building constructs. Well here's something that I see most people ignore when it comes to basic knowledge, design. We assume that being artistic is just something you're born with, and there's not much you can do if you don't got the gene. Well I've never been convinced about that argument anyways, but regardless, these are tips for anyone to utilize. Just because you don't plan on being the next Picasso, doesn't mean your party invitations or classroom newsletters can't look a little better.

Color

The worst, though not most common mistake I see is "vibration" in design. Vibration occurs when two colors clash (usually two bright colors) and create an afterimage effect that interferes with what you're seeing. Basically, it's a pain to read. Here's some examples. 

These are not good color combinations. See how hard it is to read? The letters all seem to interfere with each other! 

The best way to avoid accidentally creating vibration is by refraining from using two bright colors. Simply put, adding a light (pastel) color with a dark color usually has the best results.

Isn't this much easier to read? The colors don't compete with each other. These non-vibrating color mixtures work much better.

Font

As said by Massimo Vignelli in the film Helvetica, "I can write the word dog with any typeface and it doesn't have to look like a dog, but there are people that when they write dog it should bark!" Now I'm not saying you can't have fun with fonts, but tone it down a notch. Again, are you more concerned with having a "fun" newsletter or having a legible one? The reason you're typing something up is to convey information, so make it easy on the reader. Choose your fonts wisely. Now this is a pretty subjective topic, but I'm going to lay out some of the basic information that most designers would agree with. 

For the header of what you're writing, you can get a little creative. I would never use this text for the body paragraphs of a letter, but for a large header, it's fine. Again, graphic designers might throw a hissy fit at even going near some of the more expressive fonts, but screw that. A little is okay if you ask me. Just don't go nuts.

These are some examples of what you don't want to use for a 12pt body paragraph. (But I think would be okay for a simple, 24pt header of a birthday invitation/themed newsletter/etc.)

And here are some examples of fonts that do work for the main text.

(All these fonts either came with my laptop or were downloaded for free off of Google if you want them!)

Basically, you want your font to be as close to Helvetica or Times New Roman as possible. You can spice up the title of the page with something fun (as long as it's legible), but keep the rest of the body simple for the reader. (An example would be the title of this blog vs. the body text!)

Oh and Comic Sans. I should probably talk about that. If you don't already know, the font Comic Sans is considered by the design community to be the worst font ever created. Not kidding. But here's the thing, grade school teachers go nuts for it. I've seen it all over everything aimed at children basically my whole life. So here's my rule, you can use Comic Sans. But only if you're writing something to be read by 8 year olds. If this is to be read by anyone over the age of 12, then back the eff off and find some other font to use because anyone who knows the stigma associated with it will find the document completely unprofessional.

Images

I remember opening my high school yearbook and being horribly disappointed at how poorly done it was. Pixelated photos of our soccer team, mixed with in focus close ups looked awful. Don't make that mistake. Here is the basic rule of resizing pictures. You can make it smaller, but you can't make it bigger. If you grab a picture and resize it to be much larger, the image will get blurry. It will look bad. So if that means not using something because it won't fit the area, so be it. Trust me, giant pixelated images are much worse than empty space.

I might do more tips later, but I hope these help for now!