Design Hernia

I saw a good friend of mine the other day and she asked me to help her with a flyer design she was working on for her kids’ school. I find this fun with this friend (I’ll call her B). Although she’s not a designer herself, she 1) has excellent design sense, and 2) makes me feel like a design goddess when I help her.

Red marker at the ready, I took a look at what she had done. And got exhausted. The amount of heavy lifting she had done with this 8 1/2 x 11″ design was staggering. There were two logos, a photo, some clip art, at least three different typefaces in 5 or 6 different point sizes and three colors, and boxes galore. To her credit, she knew that it looked, um…bad. But she didn’t know how to fix it. Here’s what we did (and what you can do if you’re suffering from this problem):

Establish a visual hierarchy. We made the most important things on the page the biggest and boldest, and went down from there. Her original design didn’t have a clear visual starting point, and all of the information was weighted equally. Looking at it, my eye didn’t know where to go, so where it went was right off the page (ah, sweet relief). Making some things bigger and some things smaller tells your eye “Look here first.” Your eye likes that.

Make a grid. We divided the page into four columns. Text and images could take up one, two, or three (in the case of the headline) columns. No more scattershot placement. Your eye also finds this restful.

Lose the clip art. I’d say 92% of the time, clip art just looks bad, especially if it’s the kind that comes with your computer or you’ve downloaded it for free online (gack). Lose it, and your design looks more professional almost immediately.

Chose two typefaces. It may feel like you’re not working hard enough, but two typefaces is a lovely, safe route to follow. Try a serif and sans-serif combination (if you don’t know what that means, check out I Love Typography) — it’s a classic and deserves to be one. If you only have access to fonts that came with your computer, buy some more. Did that slip out? What I meant to say was you could use Palatino and Helvetica on a Mac and Times New Roman and Arial on a PC (boring, but acceptable, if you’re not a professional designer.) If, however, you would like to buy some better additional fonts, David Airey has some great picks on his blog. I probably would make some different choices than he did, but I haven’t written that entry yet…

Pare down your color scheme. Just because you have an unlimited palette to choose from doesn’t mean you need to use all of the colors. Keep your design down to two or three colors. If you have vividly colored graphics (hopefully not some nasty clip art, see above) even one color of type can work nicely.

Be consistent with your type sizes. Setting type at different sizes in every paragraph makes reading feel like a chore. A headline size, a subhead size, a text size and a subscript size should be plenty for one page.

Don’t make everything “pop”. When everything on the page is calling for your attention, nothing will get it. Use boxes, borders, starts, bursts, arrows, etc. sparingly.

Here’s a kind of before and after (I’m not using the real layout to conceal B’s identity. Did I mention how much I like her?)

I remember designs I did when I first started, and they suffered from all of these problems. It felt like I wasn’t doing enough designing unless I selected colors, typefaces and sizes for every. single. design. element. Ease your load, do better design.