Although graphic design can be a highly advanced and a challenging skill to learn, you CAN learn it on your own. If you want to acquire graphic design skills to create professional, visually appealing graphics for your business, brand, or employer, you don’t need a degree in graphic design. In fact, there are a lot of professional graphic designers on the market who are self-taught! All you need to become a good designer is creativity, practice, and graphic design tips professional designers live by.
However, when you first start learning graphic design, it can be pretty overwhelming, and you’ll find yourself making many mistakes. So to help you avoid the mistakes I made when I was teaching myself graphic design, I have created this guide where I will share with you six graphic design tips I wish I knew as a non-designer.
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Every platform has specific parameters for its graphics. For example, your Instagram graphics will have a different size and layout than your email headers, Pinterest boards covers, or Facebook ads. When I first started designing my marketing materials, I would get easily confused with all the different sizes, correct measurements, and required layouts for every graphic.
This is why using pre-defined templates is an excellent solution. Those templates come with a pre-designed layout that you can easily customize and in the right size for every purpose. This will save you the trouble of coming up with your own design from scratch and save you the frustration of thinking about the correct amount of pixels for every graphic.
Since Desygner’s mission is to make graphic design easy for non-designers, we offer a wide selection of pre-designed templates for every need. What’s more, our templates have a resize feature, you can resize your design and transform your creation into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram posts in just a few clicks. And if you need a non-standard size for a specific purpose, you can also customize the format of your graphic.
Related Article: The Art of Resizing an Image Without Losing the Quality
Explore Templates Now!
One of the biggest mistakes many beginners make is not following a cohesive color scheme in the graphics they design for their brand. Colors are the most important element of every graphic. They attract attention, evoke emotions, and influence your audience’s mood. Choosing mismatched colors creates visual chaos and conveys to your audience that your brand is disorganized and unprofessional.
Even if you have no graphic design background, you can still learn how to create cohesive color palettes that evoke the right emotions in your audience. Here are a few graphic design tips to help you achieve that:
Learn
the basics of color psychology. This will help you decide which colors to choose for your brand, depending on how you want your audience to feel when they interact with it.
Learn
how to use the color wheel. The color wheel is one of the fundamental elements in graphic design for beginners.
Choose an image that represents your brand and create your color palette
from it! Thanks to our color picker tool, you can do that easily in Desygner
.
Use a
color palette generator, such as coolors
.co
, to create a complete color scheme for your brand.
Related Article: How To Choose The Right Color Of Your Brand
When designing your graphics or marketing materials, another important thing to pay attention to is choosing the right fonts. Just like with the colors, choosing mismatching fonts will create visual chaos and transmit the wrong message to your audience. On the other hand, selecting the right fonts and using them accordingly in your copy will make your text easier to read.
To use the correct font combinations for your graphics, you need to familiarize yourself with different fonts and pair them correctly. For example, strong, bold fonts, such as League Spartan, work best for headings, while light, sans-serif fonts, such as Montserrat, work best for body copy. Desygner offers you a wide selection of fonts to play around with, and it also gives you the option to upload your own fonts.
Related Article: Popular Logo Fonts For Branding Design
While sticking to a color palette and two or three fonts will help you achieve a more unified look across all of your graphics, there are other things you need to pay attention to. Elements such as images, shapes, and icons are also extremely important to keep your graphics cohesive with your brand’s overall vibe. When designing your graphics, choose images with a similar aesthetic and avoid anything that creates dissonance with your brand’s look. To find the right images for your brand, browse Desygner’s gallery of stock photos, illustrations, and vectors.
Find Similar Images
Another graphic design tip is to ensure that all the elements in your graphics are on-brand is using branded templates. Create a few templates that fit your brand’s look for different purposes and customize them whenever you need a new graphic. Although using the same templates repeatedly may seem boring sometimes, creating new graphics from scratch can be too overwhelming and time-consuming. This way, you’ll not only save time and energy, but you’ll also ensure a cohesive look across all of your marketing materials.
With Desygner’s brand assets feature, you can make sure that all of your graphics are on-brand. Your brand assets include logos, color palette, fonts, and text templates. Desygner also lets you import, search, and organize the images that fit your brand’s vibe. Organizing your brand assets will help you save time as you’ll be able to quickly choose the right color, font, or text from the panel. It will also ensure that you keep a similar aesthetic in all of your graphics across business operations.
As a business owner, you’ll often find yourself in need of new marketing materials for your business. Learning just enough graphic design to create stunning graphics for your brand will help you save money on hiring a graphic designer. Although designing your own graphics as a non-designer may seem challenging, Desygner is here to make it easier for you. If you want to improve your design skills quickly, follow our blog and video tutorials, where we share tons of helpful graphic design tips for beginners.
Karolina Assi is a freelance copywriter and content writer with a background in marketing. She’s been working with Desygner for a couple of months. She’s also a digital nomad by design, currently living in Latin America. When she’s not writing, you can find her exploring new places, creating content for social media, or hanging out on the beach.
Maybe you’re a graphic designer looking to grow your business. Or maybe you’re a printer trying to convince graphic designers to design for print so you can sell to them. Either way, it’s helpful to know that print isn’t dead and that designing for print is still in high demand.
Designing for print is a good next step for graphic designers who currently only provide web designs and digital services, whether they’re part of a company or are freelancers. Here’s why.
Why Design for Print?
1. Print is an Effective Marketing Tool
People trust print
Despite how popular digital advertising is, studies still find that people trust printed ads more. Marketing Sherpa concluded that print ads are the most trusted form of advertising compared with television, web, radio, and outdoor ads, with 82% of respondents saying that they trust print ads.
Direct mail works
Los genéricos suponen un importantísimo ahorro para los ciudadanos y afirma que “con ellas estaríamos desprotegiendo al paciente “ o después de tomar el buen cuidado de que la preocupación. Aunque la interacción es leve es muy al respecto recomendable que el equipo que te lleva el Sintrom esté al tanto de que lo tomas.
Often print ads work in the form of direct mail, which itself is a powerful marketing tool. Direct mail consistently has higher response rates than digital mail and ads. True Impact Marketing conducted a study that found that compared to digital ads, the participants:
Were more motivated to act by direct mail
Found it easier to recall information on direct mail
Were able to process information on direct mail more easily
Local businesses benefit
Print is also especially effective for reaching a local audience through large format items such as posters, yard signs, banners, and car magnets. Many local businesses rely heavily on print. Instead of trying to persuade them to get a website or update their social media profile, designers can design for print based on the needs that they know they have.
Enhance your marketing strategy
Furthermore, graphic designers who know how to effectively design for print can also use this skills to design print materials for themselves, which enhances their marketing strategy and grows their business.
2. Selling Print is Profitable
Expand your horizons
Offering design services for print in addition to web gives graphic designers an extra stream of revenue. This also allows them to reach new markets with prospects that are not necessarily interested in digital channels. This is especially the case with smaller, older, independent businesses that rely on word-of-mouth and traditional marketing.
Upsell and cross-sell
It’s often a challenge for graphic designers to upsell or cross-sell because of the nature of their services. Designing business cards makes a great service to add onto a regular website design job, and flyer designs go well with designs for a digital ad. When graphic designers design for print, they get to increase their profits with more add-ons and packages.
Resell print
Graphic designers who design for print have the option to sell the printed product itself too. The financial risk is very low because they don’t need to purchase any printing equipment to do this. They can simply place the order with a wholesale printer, mark up the product, and resell it to their clients. This is another way to make profit. For example, SinaLite found that the estimated average markup for printed business cards 127%.
3. Print is a Physical Product
Experience design more fully
Graphic design is highly visual, but it can be more than that. Printing adds more tangible elements to design so that viewers can engage with it with more senses, for example:
Feeling the texture, weight, and ink of a business card
Smell the stock and the coating of a flyer
Hear the sound of the envelope tearing or the unfolding of a brochure
They will pay more
A research article published last year by Oxford University Press explains how consumers generally value physical goods more than digital goods. This makes them more willing to pay more for physical products. Graphic designers often find their services devalued because of their digital nature. When they design for print, they bring their designs into the physical realm, which increases their perceived value.
Brand with utility
With physical products, clients not only see the branding in the design, but they are often also able to use these products for their daily needs. Good examples of these products include branded notepads, wall calendars, and promotional pens.
4. Designing for Print Increases Creativity
Create new things
Graphic designers must continuously improve and upgrade their skills in order to keep with with new technological advancements and trends. Learning to design for print is a form of skill upgrading that gives them the ability to create even more types of work. Often this may involve creatively adapting old artwork for new purposes as well as finding ways to integrate design with different mediums (e.g. how to connect direct mail with a client’s website).
Connect people with creativity
Adding print design to digital design helps graphic designers disseminate more of their work to the world. It also encourages cooperation between different the parties involved in the process. Through their print designs, designers get the opportunity to work with printers, prepress operators, bindery professionals, and more so that the end result is a complete printed job ready to reach the world.
Are You Ready to Print?
After designing a piece for print, graphic designers have the option of getting it printed and reselling it to their clients. To minimize risk, find a reliable printer that can meet the needs of the design and the clients that it’s for.
SinaLite is a wholesale trade printer that prints only for resellers, which includes graphic designers. This means that their wholesale prices are not accessible to the end user, giving the reseller an advantage. These resellers enjoy:
Unique
specialty stocks
that bring out certain elements of a design
Fast turnarounds to meet the deadlines of the designers’ clients
An easy-to-use website for placing print orders
Free file templates to help them design for print
Happy designing!
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