It doesn’t matter whether you are a student or a professional graphic designer –knowing graphic design tips is the need of an hour. Graphics is widely used for a blog or social media, or it needs to be created for an awesome company presentation.
Graphic design is a challenging profession but one can master it by learning important tips for smart designing and mastering graphic design applications like Photoshop, InDesign, CorelDraw, and Illustrator.
In this blog, we have listed down few tips that are worth keeping in mind when creating your own graphic designs. The tips in this blog will have you creating great looking graphics in no time at all. Let’s learn these and start implementing them!
1. Get Inspired
If you want to learn the basics of design, then the best option is to get inspired from the experts in the field of Graphic Design. Make a collection of beautiful designs that showcases creativity and uniqueness or add it to Pinterest board. Do not try to imitate it, it should be a source of inspiration to discover your own style.
Best Sources Available: Behance and Dribble
2. Observe and Analyse
Take out time to observe the collection of designs. Each infographic, illustration, or icon contains lines, shapes, text, and other elements that are used as a combination.
Tips to follow:
The process of analysing different designs will help you realize how the tips are implemented. As you develop your own designs, you will understand what tools have been used by professionals to create particular elements.
3. Focus on alignment
Have you ever thought why a single line or eye catching decoration can boosts the appeal of your design to a great extent? Symmetry is the solution!
Tips to follow:
No matter how much your design is complicated, one should always focus on adjusting the alignment to achieve uniformity.
4. Selection of right fonts
One of the most important facets of design is clarity. It is not always a good idea to use varied typefaces in a single design. The viewer will have difficulties making adjusting his eye to diverse styles and forms, so it is advisable to use best variants of the same font family.
Rules to follow:
- Pick a font that stands out for your heading, but choose simpler subtitle and body fonts that are easy to read.
However, one should not limit all of the designs to a single font. Experiment a bit and find the perfect style for the particular project. Try to discover latest trends in graphic design. Don’t just stick to the boring default fonts when there are so many opportunities to explore.
Best Sources Available: dafont and 1001 FreeFonts
5. Emphasis on color consistency
This is the most common mistake which most of the designers make: they try to implement every skill they learned in a single design. This will result in usage of colors, fonts, shapes, and all kinds of elements.
Things to avoid while working with colors:
- Too much contrast is not a good thing in design, so avoid using red/green, purple/yellow or orange/blue combinations.
- Choose colors that complement each other.
Tips to follow:
- Choose colors that goes with the mood. For example, green color represents peace, freshness, and nature, while deep blue represents mystical or captivating.
- Observe what colors are used in your favourite product packaging.
- What are the color combinations that attract your attention?
Best Source Available: Adobe Color CC is an online tool which will help in choosing a nice palette for designs.
6. Use of Quality Images
The illustrations, diagrams, graphics, and images used always adds more meaning to the overall project. This is the main purpose of graphic design: to help convey a message in a clear and attractive manner.
One need to make sure the quality of images throughout the design remains consistent. For example, using self-clicked photographs and some professional images purchased from a stock photo website might not be same, the viewer will notice the lack of consistency.
Tips to follow:
- The style, proportions, framing, lighting, and quality of these elements should remain constant throughout the design.
- A good tip is to use a grid or frame for images where possible. This will give your design a professional edge.
Best Source Available: Freepik and Pexels
7. Learn latest Graphic Design Applications
It’s of utmost importance that alongwith learning the graphic design principles, one should also master latest graphic design applications by joining some professional diploma and certificate Graphic Design courses. Many graphic design institutes provide both short term and long term courses which can cater different needs. Make sure these courses should cover applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, InDesign and focus on Visual Design classes.
One doesn’t have to be a professional graphic designer to be interested in design. Regardless of the career path you choose, the new skills will be an add on in your portfolio and make you look attractive on the job market. The most important thing to remember in the field of Graphic Design is to stay creative and aim for innovation. As you keep practicing, the results will become better over the time.