10 Ways to Ruin Your Design
Creating good design is pretty brain-twisting, because it is not just about grab a canvas and draw. It is about idea, talent, skills, taste of beauty, and common sense. However, creating a bad design is very easy, but this guideline is meant to let designers know what to avoid.
1. Starting Out with a Blank Concept
This is the main thing to do if you’d like to have a bad layout. You don’t know what typeface or colour to be used, and above all you don’t know what the site will look like. make sure you do this if you’d like your design career to freefall.
2. Typeface from Another Planet
Try to use 3 years-old kid handwriting on a professional company artwork or serif fonts for kid oriented promotion artwork. Make it not clear enough to be read and show it to your clients, they’ll surely remember you forever.
3. Spelling Errors
Spelling mistakes are something a designer should be very careful of. Try to write ‘pray’ as ‘play’, and your client will think you are ‘playing’ on their business. It’s best if client can provide an editable text contents for designer to copy and paste directly. It will minimize the errors.
4. The Unmatched Colour Combination
Colour gives big influence to artworks. So make sure you use right colour for right purpose. You can try to use ‘pink’ for an industrial and engineering website, so your clients will try googling around again for another design house in town. Anyway, If you’re not sure about colour adjustment, this tool might help.
5. Cluttered Design
Put all element, text, pictures and videos and forcing them to fill in the area will wreck the design. Having empty spaces in between elements are essential to create a good layout. Some brochure and booklet layout even have a big area of white space as part of design. It will give the reader a good clean and professional ‘look’.
6. Outdated Style
Graphic design has something in common with fashion design. There’re times when we should avoid some elements or effects which are very popular in past because it doesn’t look good in recent world anymore. Let’s say bevel and emboss effect, some times ago, bevel effect with 5 pixel depth is quite pretty in the eye, but recently 1 pixel is enough.
7. Wrong Design for Specific Machine
A design which looks good on a computer screen doesn’t mean it will looks good in result, especially in print design. Be very careful to use colour in this type of design. Make sure the CMYK colour combination is correct, otherwise, you’ll end up having ears chewed-off from your clients.
8. Bad Communication Between Clients and Designers
This is something very important as well. Client has to define clearly what they require and designer has to listen carefully too. A designer should be able to justify their design approach while compromising to the client needs. Or else, client and designer will go to different directions.
9. Too Many Boss Around
One of the thing commonly happens in design process is more than one person involved in the decision making. Design is subjective that you’ll get different idea from different person. If you try to accommodate all idea into a single artwork, surely nobody will like it in the end of the day.
10. A Must-do Request from Client
99% of client are having bad design taste (that’s why they ask for a design service). And 1% of them probably have a good taste but doesn’t have any skills to visualize their ideas. However, It is always good if client can follow suggestions offered by designers, because designers always have better design taste.
Related posts:
- What Is Good Design?
- How Many Design Changes Can You Take?
- Creative design – between price and quality
- SewaKomputer.com – A Case Study
- New Beegamax.com is Up!
Wahidin Wong is an experienced online strategy consultant with more than 10 years involvement within the industry. Founder of Beegamax Creative, a creative design and online marketing strategy firm based in Jakarta, Indonesia. You can find his insights and design tips here in the ArtPlus.Get updated: Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn
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