Colour

Colours can be used for consistent branding and brand recognition, but they can also be used to provoke an emotional response.

For example red and yellow are often used to highlight things of importance, but in slightly different ways. Red conveys urgency, energy, and power, whilst yellow conveys hope and a cheerful feeling. Blue on the other hand is often associated with safety, happiness, and a professional or businesslike impression.

Consider your audience, their norms and perceptions, carefully in order to choose colours that will create the right impression.

Choose a small palette of 3-5 colours. Too many colours and you will overwhelm the reader visually. Use a combination of soft tones and accent colours so that you can use these to emphasise different areas of the design. An online tool like colourlovers.com can be very helpful in generating potential palettes.

If your images contain one or more colours from your design, it can create harmony throughout the whole design.

Consider how your text colour will interact with background colours and ensure that text is clear and legible throughout.

Typography

Learn about different types of font to understand how different fonts convey different feelings and impressions. You can do this at fonts.google.com or 1001freefonts.com. These sites are very helpful as you can enter your text and see it in multiple fonts at the same time. You can also narrow down your search by various font features to see how the fonts change in appearance or search by styles.

Don’t use more than 2 or maximum 3 fonts. Generally it’s best to choose fonts that are easily legible, rather than handwritten styles which, depending on the font, can be difficult to read.

Use similar font sizes and weights for items of similar importance, eg, keep headings a consistent size and weight if they are all of equal importance.

Layout

The order and position in which you present information influences the way people will read it. Most information has some kind of logical sequence which follows the way people will process the information, so try to put yourself in the shoes of your reader and identify what information they will want or what questions they will have, and in what order.

Structure the content into sections to make it easier to read and understand. You can use design features or images to separate sections, but as always, don’t overuse these features - if it starts to detract from the message, cut back.

Use a simple and clean layout to make the document easier to navigate. Keep margins and alignments consistent through the whole document to avoid distracting the reader from the message.

Highlights

Highlighting specific words or sections of text using bold, italics, or quotes allows you to emphasise important points and, again, helps the reader to navigate through the document. However, they must be used carefully and sparingly - if too much is highlighted, nothing stands out any more, and the reader becomes overwhelmed.

Bold is great for highlighting important words or phrases or adding emphasis. Italics can also be used to highlight specific words/phrases, but offer less emphasis than bold. You can switch one for the other to decide which one suits your sentence more. Italics are also good in combination with quotation marks for short quotes of a sentence or less, or to suggest someone speaking.

Space

Empty space or negative space plays an important role in your design to help readers navigate the different sections. Empty space creates invisible lines between sections that make information look clear, structured, and balanced - step back and take a look at your design from a little further away to see if it is balanced.

Putting plenty of space around a single object or section of text will make it stand out more, so creating more emphasis where you need it.

Images & Special Effects

Images are a powerful way to convey a message instantly, without the need to read. This can help to catch someone’s attention long enough for them to start reading or it can add an additional layer of emotion to the written text. However, they can only do this if they are highly relevant and consistent with the written message, so choose images carefully.

Sites like shutterstock.com have a great search facility to help you find the perfect image. Choose a few images on your theme and then review them to see what emotions you feel when you look at them. If the emotional message is right, compare the colour in the different images to see if they will compliment your palette.

Be careful with effects like drop shadows and frames. Often when beginning design we are impressed by these features and tend to overuse them, but these effects should only be used to enhance an image, not to become the central theme of the design.

Icons & Graphics

As with many of the other design features we’ve discussed above, icons and graphics must be kept simple. The most important thing is that they can be easily understood by anyone in your audience. As with images and effects, icons and graphics should only be used to aid comprehension. If they are distracting in any way, it’s best to avoid them.

Graphs & Tables

Similarly with graphs and tables - keep them to a minimum and ensure that they are aiding comprehension. Any data you present must be essential, simplified, and well labelled.

Readers will not take the time to interpret complex data unless absolutely necessary. Make it as easy as possible for them - present only the essential data, consider carefully the best type of graph or table to clearly present the data, and keep it as simple and clear as possible, with a clear label introducing it so that people understand its importance.

Never add graphs and tables to ‘bulk up’ a document or to make it seem more ‘technical’. Unnecessary data will be ignored and might even stop people reading.

Proportion

Just as you can use empty space to highlight a particular object or section in your document, you can also use proportion to influence emphasis. Increasing the size of an object or its area will increase importance in the reader’s mind. When your design is finished, again, take a step back to decide which sections stand out the most and how you can change this by amending the relative proportions of the sections.

Simplicity

You might have noticed by now that the single most important thing in design is simplicity! As we said at the beginning, less is more. When your design is finished, it’s often useful to take a step back and look at it with fresh eyes to consider whether taking some design features out might actually make the document easier to read or might make important messages more clear.

If you’re struggling to get to grips with your own designs, don’t forget we have our own inhouse graphic designer who can do the hard work for you! Call us today to discuss your print job.