Creating great looking brochures, flyers, or maybe a billboard are often a frightening task to most of the people . But with the proper help and guidance you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll turn mundane documents into professionally looking publications.
A successful document is one that effectively communicates your message. Good design contributes to the general effectiveness and usefulness of your document by making it more visually appealing and more readable.
Good design isn’t just a matter of aesthetics; it involves choosing the foremost appropriate design elements for your document. Good design choices produce lively and interesting publications and help communicate your message.
Following what I call my 10 commandments, you’ll avoid the pitfalls that the majority people fall under once they first start to place together their publications.
Here are my 10 commandments
• what’s the aim of your communication?
Every document features a purpose. Some are meant to influence (such as advertisements, sales brochures, posters, and flyers). Others are designed to tell (such as business reports, bulletins, and newsletters).
• Who is your intended audience?
Identifying your audience helps you select design tools and techniques that grab the readers’ interest. As you develop your publication, take your readers’ perspective. Consider their needs and reactions. Your goal is to interact together with your readers, not talk at them. By writing and designing from this attitude you’ll grab their attention.
• what’s the image or impression that you simply want to project?
How does one want your audience to perceive you? what’s the general look and feel of your publication? Is it formal or informal? is that the content serious or fun? This overall image is supported by your choice of fonts and graphic elements, and your literary genre .
• What elements are needed to reinforce your design?
Create an inventory of parts which will enter the ultimate composite of your documents. Will you employ headlines and subheads, photographs, or graphics? Will you employ rules, or borders, or boxes? what proportion text will you use? what percentage pages?
Once you’ve got an honest idea of the pieces you would like , organising them into an attention grabbing page design is far easier.
• Make it easy for readers to seek out their way about
Think about the flow of the text. Have a logical structure with text rising and down the columns.
• Choose appropriate fonts
Using the proper fonts will help to urge your message across. stick with only employing a maximum of three different fonts per publication. a mix of serif and san-serif will add more interest. generally , serif type is taken into account more readable while san-serif is more legible.
• do not be afraid to use white space
People feel the necessity to fill every a part of the page with information. Unless you’re designing a newsletter, consider adding many white space around your images and text. it’d be the foremost boring information you’ve got to write down about, but a minimum of make it attractive to seem at.
• Avoid undesirable “rivers” of white space or “white” holes within the page
A very distracting visual effect. this happens in poorly set text where large type is justified in narrow columns. This often appears when pressing the spacebar twice after each period . To remedy this, alter the sort size, or adjust the road length, or change the column width, and stop pressing the key twice.
• Avoid a busy page layout
To many bordered elements or rules tend to compartmentalise the page and hack the natural flow of text.
• Be consistent in your publication
What you’re trying to find is consistency. If you stick with using my 10 commandments then all of your publications will look as if it has been designed by knowledgeable .
These tips are just alittle sample of what we cover on our Design Principles and Techniques Training Course.
Wishing you success
