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Graphic Design Mistakes that Are Bad for Marketing

Graphic Design Mistakes

Graphics are important marketing materials that help build your brand image. From website layouts to social media graphics, the eye for design is key to boosting credibility and building brand awareness. A compelling visual can make the audience take a pause and know more about your business. It can attract clicks and drive customers to take action. Bad design is one of the fastest ways to drive people away from your products. Most businesses share that excellent graphic design has helped them improve their reputation and revenue.

Graphic Design Mistakes that Are Bad for Marketing

However, the challenge is not all marketing persons are good at graphic design. Some businesses that opt to save costs are creating the graphics themselves. The result is bad. Graphic design is not as easy as putting texts over a photo or playing with colours and fonts. To create designs that can grab consumers’ attention, you should have a thorough understanding of graphic design elements.

Here are the most common graphic design mistakes that are hurting your business.

  1. Using Too Many Fonts

There are many beautiful fonts that you can use but using multiple fonts can ruin your brand message. Too many fonts compete for attention and it will be hard for your consumers where to focus. When designing a website, newsletter, or banner ads, keep your fonts to a minimum. 2 or 3 font styles are ideal.

While it is good to play with fonts to convey different messages and feelings, they can distract the readers. Pick a font that is easy to read. Ensure that there is good spacing between letters, not too condensed or stretched. When it comes to using fonts, it is important to be consistent and impactful.  A busy-looking and cluttered design creates confusion and affects readability.

  1. Bad Hierarchy

Good design is like a perfect meal. It comes with the right recipe and ingredients. In graphic design, this is called hierarchy. To properly grab the attention of the users, there should be a balance between the placement of design elements and the emphasis you want to create.

For example, you might make the heading with a heavy font and place it on top of the page. The key to creating the right hierarchy is navigation. Where do you want the users to look? Rank the importance of the information you want to share to avoid making the eyes of the users jump all over the place. Aside from fonts and placement, colour brightness/depth, images, and graphic elements should fit appropriately.

  1. Over Designing

The best graphics are always the ones that are simple and clean-looking. Less is more. Though Photoshop, Canva, and other design software offer you a lot of fancy design elements and filters, it does not mean that you have to use them all. Overstuffing your design can be too confusing to the users. It is annoying to the eyes and the brain should not have a hard time processing information. With too many designs and effects, the users will probably skip over the information and ignore your marketing materials.

  1. Using the Wrong Colours

Just like using too many fonts, using too many colours can make your design distracting to the users. Choosing the wrong colours makes the design ineffective. If you want to put emphasis on a certain text, use dark or bold colours.

Instead of using a lot of colours you think are good, consider creating a colour palette for your brand. Then, test your fonts if they will blend perfectly and are still readable along with your chosen colours. Play with levels of saturation and contrast. A good example is using dark text over a light background and light text over a dark background.

  1. Lacking Creativity

While it can be helpful to use stock images, they do not always work favourably for your marketing strategy. The same photo gets used over and over again and most of the audience has already seen them from other businesses. This makes your graphic designs look cheap and unprofessional. If possible, try purchasing high-quality images or use your own photos.

Also, make sure to double-check your work and spot any misspellings, grammatical errors, and improper spacing. Have someone look at your work and ask for feedback. Spend time doing the final revisions before posting your graphic design product to your marketing campaigns.

Wrapping Up

If you need a hand with your graphic design project, Clover Marketing can help. We have a team of creative professionals who have a deep understanding of design and marketing. We can fulfil any requests from logos, website design, and newsletters, to banner ads and unique advertisements. Not just that, our team is also committed to guiding you with content creation strategy so you could utilise your graphic design projects for better results and engagement.

 

If you’d like expert advice, get in touch

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