Five Golden Rules for Effective Design

Looking at graphic design from the outside-in may make it seem like an easy task. Produce some colourful illustrations, a bit of text here and there and voila! Wrong! Effective design relies on careful execution and intricate details that reflect your, or the client’s brand to a T.

As with starting any business process, allocate sufficient planning time before commencing design. This allows you to select the best programs, assess the brand image and decide on layouts and colour schemes before anything is created, making the process much smoother for your designers. Should you be carrying out the design process yourself, and need a few top tips, here are some Golden Rules for Effective Design.

Contrast

Using contrasting colours, fonts and other content help to accentuate specific areas you want the user to focus on. Effective contrasting can allow for quicker ingestion of the important information, hooking the user and reducing your bounce rate/ boosting engagement.

Depth

By adding some depth to your design, you make things look more exciting and attractive instead of two-dimensional and a bit standard. A great example of depth and unique design is Dirty Habit Wickham’s new website, with lots of animated sections and three-dimensional aspects to add a bit of spice to their website!

Consistency

Assuming you planned your design stage in sufficient detail, you should have set out some brand guidelines and colour schemes. It is crucial to stay consistent in your design across all your platforms and channels as this will help to establish your brand’s identity. Finding an image that suits your business, and maintaining it, is key to growth on the internet these days, so make something attractive and spread it like wildfire wherever you have a presence.

Variation

Whilst the term variation may contradict that of consistency, it is important to keep yourself unique. Make your designs different to that of other companies in your market. Variation should be what makes your designs stand out. Make sure though, if you change a statement section of your design, that this change is taken into effect everywhere necessary to keep consistency, finding the balance between these two is key.

Interactivity

Especially in terms of websites and marketing, having interactive capabilities can be an enabler for future sales and the deciding factor in a user’s decision to become a customer. Interactive aspects can be a handful of things:

• CTAs (Call to Actions)
• Forms
• Videos
• 360-degree product imagery

And even more! By including something a user can actively click on, move or follow, you increase engagement on your site and are more likely to at least communicate with potential customers, especially through CTAs!

Ensuring your designs follow at least some of these Golden Rules can be a great stepping stone to taking your website and graphics to the next level. There is much so more to graphic design than we can write in a single article, so check out the rest of our blog here!