Graphic Design Tips I Wish I Knew as a Non-Designer
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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6 Graphic Design Tips for Beginners and Non-Designers
Tip #1: Use Pre-Designed Templates
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
Tip #2: Create a Color Scheme for Your Brand
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
Tip #3: Choose the Right Font Combination
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
Tip #4: Make Your Design Cohesive
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.
Tip #5: Use Branded Templates
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.
Tip #6: Organize Your Brand Assets
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.
Final Thoughts
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.
About The Guest Author
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.
