DIY Design 101
Listen, we love tools like Canva. They have completely revolutionized life for small business owners. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to design a quick Instagram post or promotional flyer, you had to sell a kidney to buy Photoshop and spend three months watching YouTube tutorials just to figure out how to crop a photo.
Nowadays? You can whip up a graphic in 5 minutes while waiting in line for your coffee. But it doesn’t mean you’re ready to call yourself a professional graphic designer. If you want your designs to look professional, follow these basic guidelines to up your graphic game.
Avoid Font Soup:
We get it. You start designing, see a library of 10,000 gorgeous fonts and suddenly your design has 12 different fonts and weights. It’s chaotic, hard to read, and subconsciously signals to your audience that your brand lacks structure.
For 99% of your marketing materials, you only need 2 fonts:
- Display Font: This is your personality font. Use it for your big headlines. It can be bold, stylized, or script.
- Body Font: This is your workhorse. It should be clean and extremely easy to read. This is the font you’ll use for subheadings, bullet points, and paragraphs.
Pro tip: Once you’ve landed on your fonts, use them across all your designs. Consistency builds recognition!
Don’t Fear Negative Space:
You don’t need to fill every single millimeter of space in your design. Resist the urge to add your title, three paragraphs of details, four different stickers, a border, your logo in 3 different spots, etc. When a graphic doesn’t have any breathing room, the human eye doesn’t know where to look first. Instead of reading the message, scrollers will keep on scrolling.
Embrace the white space. This isn’t wasted space. It’s a powerful tool. It creates visual hierarchy and forces the reader’s eye directly to what matters most.
Contrast Catastrophe:
You find a beautiful photo of a sunset or a busy office space, and you slap a dark grey text right on top.
Here’s the thing, if your audience has to squint, tilt their screen, or zoom in to read your graphic, you’ve already lost them. High aesthetic appeal should never come before readability.
Before you export, shrink your graphic down on your screen and squint your eyes. Can you still easily read the header? If it blends into the background, you have a contrast issue.
Try these quick fixes:
- Darken the photo: Put a semi transparent black square over your background image. This will help your text stick out more.
- Use text blocks: Place your text inside a solid shape or banner so it sits cleanly on top of a busy photo.
- Increase the size difference: Make sure your headlines are dramatically bigger than your body text so the important stuff pops instantly.
Know When to call in the Pros:
DIY tools are fantastic for day to day social media posts. But when it comes to the heavy hitters, like your core logo, brand identity, website, etc, investing in professional design pays for itself 10 times over. A professional designer doesn’t just make things look pretty, they understand visual psychology, file formatting, accessibility standards, and how to build a visual system that scales your business.
