Design Tips to Solve Your Creative & Marketing Needs

Paul Rand, widely known as the father of graphic design, once said that "design is the silent ambassador of your brand." When done right, it leaves a lasting impression and ensures your audience hears the message loud and clear.

Learning a few key design trends and techniques enables you to develop and expand your creative capabilities. Below are our top 5 graphic design tips to enhance your creativity while meeting client demands.

This blog covers:

Website Design Tips

Perfecting PowerPoint Presentation Design

Effective Facebook Ad Designs

Tips for Character Design

Motion Design Tips

Website Design Tips

Website design offers a multitude of different styles to follow. Depending on your brand, you can opt for a design that is minimalist, classic or sleek or one that is contemporary, vibrant and playful. Excellent web design contributes to user functionality and experience, making it an imperative for any brand site. Check out what we did for packt:

Tips for an effective website design include:

Effective use of your logo. Using a transparent background allows you to place the logo anywhere. Be sure to use the highest-quality file available, even for the smaller logo images. You may also want to incorporate your site and brand colors in your logo itself. Have a look at what our Creative Directors have to say about famous logos, what they love and don’t love.
A minimalist homepage. A clutter-free homepage lets you communicate your message instantly. Keep important content above the fold, space your content out evenly, and use imagery often. It is also essential to add a call-to-action to your homepage. This encourages visitors to undertake a particular action on your website.
Employ visual hierarchy. This design principle enables you to show your content clearly and effectively. It directs visitor attention to specific page elements in order of priority. Element placement and text size and weight are the two core components of visual hierarchy.
Make it user friendly. Enhance site readability by contrasting the text and background colors. Use UI design tips like appropriate letter sizes, site-friendly fonts, and text themes. Additionally, make sure your website navigation is easy and convenient. Techniques include vertical navigation, an always-visible main menu, and a logo linked to the homepage.
Make it mobile friendly. More people use their phones rather than their computers to browse online. It is critical to tailor and optimize your website for mobile. This version is typically cleaner than the desktop website, with different navigation techniques to accommodate mobile size limitations.

Perfecting PowerPoint Presentation Design

Whether in school, at work, or sitting through your friend’s suspiciously pyramid-looking business proposal, almost everyone has come across PowerPoint presentations. You have probably also encountered the two ends of the Powerpoint presentation spectrum. On the one end: a presentation can be deeply engaging and help you understand the topic at hand. On the other: it can be a painful suffering, enduring slide after slide until the “Thank you for your time” slide makes its glorious appearance.

Knowing how to ace PowerPoint presentations goes a long way towards communicating your message clearly. It allows the audience to invest in you and gives them vital takeaways. Here are four PowerPoint design tips to help you create the perfect professional presentation:

1. Create a Simple Template

Using a template is one of the elemental PowerPoint design tips to follow for an effective PowerPoint presentation. It is the easiest way to maintain consistency of colors, fonts, and backgrounds throughout the presentation. Templates can be as simple as using one design for every slide, or you can use templates with specific designs for title, content and lock-up slides.

2. Typography 101

Typography is a key element to graphic design, contributing to hierarchy, legibility, and brand recognition. Because PowerPoint is a concept-sharing platform, understanding and mastering the art of typography is essential to help your audience understand your message.

Typography design involves the understanding of typefaces, fonts, and color contrast. Though similar, typefaces and fonts are different. A typeface refers to a family of fonts, such as the crowd-favorites Arial and Times New Roman. A font is a typeface variation, typically italicized or bold. However, typefaces can reach as many as ten fonts - though using all ten is extremely unusual (and complete overkill unless your presentation is about fonts).A good tip is to stick to the more standard fonts. People already have an affinity and familiarity for fonts like Times New Roman, Calibri, and Garamond. It is also advisable to consider pairing complementary fonts. Creating contrast is significant because it enhances legibility and naturally draws the audience’s eye to the headline information. This can be achieved with a single font by using differing colors on a clean background.

3. Add Quality Images

Adding impactful imagery is a non-negotiable when it comes to designing a good PowerPoint presentation. Proper visual aids will complement and reinforce your message. Avoid unnecessary space fillers - these will just clutter your slides. When you have the right images, the next thing to check is the image quality. Ensuring that your images retain their crisp look on a projected screen is vital. Clip art generally lacks any emotional pull, and steer clear of those obvious stock photos. Although the cost might seem excessive, consider investing in those high-quality images for presentation enhancement.

Another important tip: stay away from too many special effects. They may appear impressive but they often distract from a message. In addition, they get old quickly, running the risk of boring or annoying your audience. If you use special effects, ensure they justify their inclusion and significantly impact your presentation.

4. Navigate Slides Like a Pro

Learn those shortcut keys that let you navigate the slides in a nonlinear fashion. This neat and easy skill enables you to skip forward, backward, or directly to a particular page according to your needs or audience request.

Effective Facebook Ad Designs

Facebook is one of the biggest global advertising platforms. Small businesses right through to mega-corporations make use of it. For this reason, an effective ad design is vital to help you stand out from the competition. The following 6 Facebook ad design tips will aid you in making the most of your advertisements:

1. Keep the Text Short and Sweet

People typically use Facebook for news, interaction, and busting boredom. They wish to spend as little time as possible viewing ads. Thus, it is critical to shorten your supplementary text, delivering your point quickly and succinctly. Try to stay under 280 characters and focus on a single message. Examples of short, snappy text include "now opening at X mall," "dress sale 10% off," and "free shipping on orders over $100."

2. Use Simple Typography

The right typography makes reading your ad copy effortless. Decorative and flamboyant fonts may attract attention, but they can distract from your central message. For the best results, combine a scroll-stopping headline or piece of copy with a single font (rather than asking more of the reader with multiple fonts).

3. Consider Ad Placement

Brands have the choice of placing their Facebook ads on the mobile feed, right column, or desktop feed displays. These placements come in different sizes and offer various benefits. Understanding how your target clients utilize Facebook can guide you in knowing the best fit for your needs. If you’re unsure, you can use Facebook’s Automatic Placement function and let the platform decide for you.

4. Take Advantage of Microtargeting

Facebook has a wealth of data on users’ jobs, interests, life events, and locations, offering unrivaled precision when it comes to customer targeting. You can use this to customize your ads to microtarget very specific audience types. By making use of niche audiences, you can capture their attention with close-to-personalized messaging and increase the chance of successful lead generation.

5. Select the Best Format

Further to ad placement, there are various ad formats on Facebook, including image ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, and stories ads. The multiple styles appeal to different user groups, and some formats suit specific industries better. Choose the format that best suits your ad or campaign. For example, you can use collection ads to display a range of products or video ads to demonstrate your services. You can also mix-and-match formats to increase touchpoints and expand the campaign creative.

6. Build Brand Association

Facebook ads should feel and look like your brand personality. Your ad should include your brand's logo, color scheme, typography, and critical services and products.

Tips for Character Design

Your brand, or the product or service you offer, might call for a character to represent who it is or what it does. In this case, how do you create a character that is recognizable, relevant, and (arguably most importantly) well-designed (like our beloved Shmoon)?

Research. This is the most effective character design tip you can get. It helps you learn as much about the actual character as possible before beginning your design. Is it a he or a she? Stylized or realistic? Simple or detailed? How many colors make up the character? Don’t rush this step - it provides references to inspire your imagination.

When you have a character idea (or a few) in mind, begin sketching loosely. Avoid getting into a painstakingly detailed start. This is the time to experiment, so don't fall in love with any designs too soon. The most important aspect to get right is that your character's expressions and attitude represent your content and vision.

When you start putting down more details, a good tip is to use less lines rather than more. Too many lines can distract from your character. Applying C-curves and S-curves is a helpful trick that most designers incorporate into their work. These two shapes can make up any body part. For instance, S-curves can form wavy hair, and the face is mostly made up of C-curves.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to exaggerate your design to bring out a character trait. People prefer personality over perfection!

Motion Design Tips

Motion graphics create the illusion of rotation or movement. Think illustrated characters strolling past a simple background or moving text bubbles. Motion graphics are excellent for driving hype to a new product or product feature, building brand awareness, or explaining a new topic.

If you’re looking to improve your design skills by picking up motion graphics, remember to:

use static designs - the simpler, the easier!
keep your initial design brief
take your time

Although motion graphics have a bit of a learning curve, following these simple tips makes it easier to make your venture into motion design fun and productive.