10 Graphic Design Rules To Never Break

Graphic design plays an important role in the modern marketing environment and has created a competitive edge for various companies all over the world. We researched some relevant graphic design rules that can be used for creatives.

Graphic design is the art of planning and projecting your ideas into the visual or textual form of content. It helps to communicate messages or ideas in a visual way that attracts the attention of customers and conveys the message of your product, event, project, or campaign.

Graphic designing is used by different companies to promote their products and services and sell them through advertisements on websites or social media platforms. It conveys complicated information through a well-designed format using infographics and helps the brand to develop its own identity and stand out in the competitive market. 

Importance of graphic design

Today, every business needs a professional graphic designer to create marketing materials such as website designs, social media designs, brochures, logo designing, and many more to convey the message effectively to the target audience. 

Graphic design rules are a set of principles that are followed by the graphic designer to create an impressive design and leave a powerful impact on the audience. The importance of graphic design can be summed up as.

• An impressive graphic design creates a powerful first impression in the minds of your prospective customers. 
• A well-planned strategy in graphic design establishes a brand image and identity that remains consistent in the competitive marketing environment.
• Graphic designs communicate the story of your brand to new and potential audiences in the form of images, charts, and reports and grab their attention towards your product offerings.
• A brand that can be seen by people helps to build trust and credibility.
• Effective visualization of your brand builds a long-term relationship with customers.
• A good graphic design will gain more visibility and thus lead to an increase in sales. Attractive visuals, higher visibility, and effective communication of ideas generate more traffic and build credibility.

10 Graphic design rules to never break

Graphic design makes your brand visually appealing and gives value to your content. Here’s a list of rules that you can follow while developing your brand in the online market.

1. Design with consistency

Consistency is a major factor while developing your brand digitally. Being consistent in designing will ensure that your target audience will never mistake you with another poorly represented brand. The most important aspects where you have to be consistent in graphic designing are your fonts and color palettes. 

• Color Palette – It’s best to use not more than 5 colors in your design
• Font – You should never use more than 3 fonts in your design. This will also give uniformity to your text and thus it will maintain the consistency of your brand.

2. Avoid more legibility and readability

The primary purpose of your design is to communicate with your audience and thus legibility and readability become your top priority.

E.g.

• To use low contrast between your text and your background, so always keep your contrast high
• Overuse of capital letters – By using more caps, readers feel like they are being YELLED AT. This is because all the letters in caps have the same height and block-like shape but in lower case, letterforms are uniquely shaped and each letter can be easily identified and read by users. 

 So avoid these mistakes and improve the readability and legibility of your design.

3. Have a purposeful hierarchy

Hierarchy is the arrangement of visual elements to inform the importance of your design. More elements are given more attention such as color, scale, types, etc. and the least important elements are given the least attention. Even by making the smallest adjustments in your design such as weight, color, or size, the information becomes much easier and more meaningful. 

4. Use short text lines

A body copy line should contain a minimum of 6 words in each line and about 30-40 characters (including spaces) in each line. You should always use only a few words and maintain the word limit in your design by using only those keywords that describe your design. 

5. Maintain your alignment

A messy design will always look unprofessional and will hurt your brand. A simple rule that can be applied here is to pick a line on your page and try to align your text and graphics with it. Your line could be vertical or horizontal and always make sure that your graphics or text don’t appear just randomly. One method to do this is to simply add a left alignment on your page as it will give it an order. 

6. Choose a logical color palette

Color is one of the most powerful tools for all designers, thus a properly chosen consistent palette would be an important step in doing graphic designing. When you compile your color palette, you should always check your past uses of colors and color theory. Your color theory can greatly impact your customers. For example – the Orange color stimulates appetite, so the orange color is commonly used in food designs. Always follow certain conventions and codes in choosing a color to convey attractive and punchy designs that convey your message.

7. Embrace your whitespace

Whitespace is a perfectly normal and most desirable part of graphic design. Whitespace is called a negative space of your page that contains nothing on it such as no words, no pictures, or no graphic design. Whitespace makes your page look clean and professional. Due to clear spacing on your page, it becomes easy for your audience to navigate through your webpage. 

8. Check for your grammar mistakes

Too many punctuations, grammar, or spelling mistakes can quickly disappoint your audience. It’s a sign that you just created a design but didn’t take time to completely go through it and screaming unprofessionally to your readers. You should always take a few minutes to check your work completely after making your design. Grammarly and Hemingway are great software tools that check your grammatical errors.

9. Use the right tools

It is one of the important rules of graphic design as a good graphic designer should know what tools can be used in different situations. Different tools come up with various formats and options which you can choose from and create designs for different purposes. Some of the tools for graphic design such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are used widely by designers. 

10. Design for your audience

Every design is created for your specific audience who will be viewing and engaging with them. Creating a colorful and bright design will always be more eye-catching and attractive.

Conclusion

If you add poor graphics on your page, you will lose your customer as they may find you unworthy of what you are offering to them. But if you follow all the above rules of graphic design carefully, you will never lose your target audience and build engagement and trust in your competence. Rules are meant to be broken but if you carefully abide by all the above rules, you will build your brand digitally that will reach more people. 

Clap Creative offers a great graphic design service to its clients such as banner design, logo design, and brochure design that are created by professional graphic designers who are consistent and deliver optimal performance. We know how to grab the attention of the audience through high-quality designs and by following the rules of graphic design.