Top 5 design sins of non-designers

Top 5 design sins of non-designers

Designing a simple event poster is a simple enough job for anyone to do. However, if you are not familiar with few basic rules your poster might end up in a "hall of fame" of disaster designs.

Over the years I noticed that some of the tacky design mishaps are vanishing, but there as many that are still going strong. Here is my list of top 5 mistakes that tell me it was a poor DIY design job.

• Centering everything

Centering everything causes visual flow issues, especially if there is some text involved. The eye of the viewer is constantly searching for the next line to focus on, which makes it tiring and ineffective.

The better approach is to left-align your poster as it is much easier to read. Also you can try clustering the information and placing it in columns.

• Using many fonts (3+)

Too many fancy fonts create clutter, and visual overstimulation. This results in the eye of the viewer jumping between different fonts and other design elements trying to make sense of all the pieces.

If you are not skilled in selecting best fonts, stick to the basic one or two you know.

• Tacky emphasis - all caps, underlining, bulky boxes and borders

Emphasis can be a very delicate matter; overdoing it creates a chaotic design. Too much or wrong kind of emphasis makes it hard to follow what is important, as everything is shouting "look at me". Viewer's eye is jumping from one piece of information to the other with an inability to determine any kind of flow or hierarchy.

Pick just one type of emphasis - bold usually works best, but do not overdo it!

• Warped photos

Photos that are improperly resized to fit the page are one of the major eye sores. Although you may think no one will notice; people see distortions very fast especially if it involves human face.

Properly resizing and cropping the photo to fit your page is crucial to make your design look good.

• Cliparts

Cliparts were not invented to be placed in corners of your poster! I roll my eyes when I see cliparts on posters and presentations as they do not add anything to the content other than clutter and often confusion.

It is perfectly fine to have nothing in the corners; white space is fantastic!

While avoiding these top 5 design mishaps does not make you a designer yet, but you will avoid placement on the "hall of fame" of disaster designs.