8 Graphic Design Secrets for beginners

Hi, friends! We've made a list of 8 graphic design secrets, that will make your design professional and will teach a beginner how to work with composition.To be confident in your design, you need to know the basic rules of it, just like how the typography, colors, spacing and other design elements work. Trust us - if you dig a little, it becomes simple!

1. The simpler, the better

A simple design does not have to be completely plain or lack fun elements or extra infographics. A simple design is one that is easily understood and intuitive, allowing viewers to understand it from the first second.

Your design needs to communicate the intent of your content clearly and honestly. If your viewer has the wrong idea of what your content is trying to tell them, your design isn't good enough. Same works for the creating of web design. Each page should lead users to one action, excluding the navigation and footer. As we said in our previous article about minimal design, your composition needs to breathe, so viewers can understand it and digest easily. 

Check our guide about minimal design to know more.

2. Color Palette

Consider the Psychology of Color - when choosing the color, think about the emotions you want your audience to experience. That's how most brands do it!

Try a bright contrasting color palette to grab viewer's attention. Bold colors will make a simple design feel more complex and interesting. To make the most of contrasting color, opt for hues from opposite positions on the color wheel with similar saturations. If that option is too much for your liking, try other color wheel based pairs. Contrast is always a good idea!Similarly, if you're creating design for a client, you can pick the right colors by checking their brand book (if they have one), checking their website and social media. You can easily find the colors suitable for any business area by googling the pictures from this area, placing them in Illustrator or Photoshop and picking the main colors from there. You should try it!

This guide will let you learn more details about the colors and how to work with them.

3. Typography

For the composition, you should choose a maximum of 2 fonts - one for a header and a slightly different one for a text body. Why?

If you will mix different fonts and weights, your design will look overloaded and barely readable. With 2 fonts, it will look contrasted and simple.

Still, the best way to use fonts in your composition, is to choose 1 font and set it as Bold for the header and as Minimum or Regular for the body text. Look for a type family that includes multiple weights with plenty of contrast between them. We have a list of most actual fonts, you can use in your design.

4. Visual Hierarchy

The importance of your design elements should be seen from the image. Users should not have to think about what to look at or how to move across a design. Even the simplest visual compositions should have a distinct hierarchy.

It starts with a dominant visual. It can be infographics, image or header, anything that should make a first impression.

The second element in the visual hierarchy should be a complementary element to your main object, the one that gives your first element more weight.

The third is a secondary bit of details or action for users to complete. In web design, the final visual element can be a navigation menu. 

Viewers expect to find all of these elements and the eye is trained to move through the elements in basically this order. Make it easier for them by setting the hierarchy they're used to.

5. Design Elements

Use consistency - particular color palette, particular shapes and elements. If your inforgaphics will have different angles of corners, it will visually repel the viewer and thus will make your design feel unnatural.

A good and timesaving tip is to create templates for your design system, or use the premade one. As a result, creating such templates for your design will help you to always keep the same style and grid, visual hierarchy you've planned ahead, etc.

6. Readability

Readability is the key of good design. It comes to each element inside - text shouldn't be too wide or narrow, colors should match with each other, infographics sizes should be pretty for human eye.

And not just for any regular - some people need to enlarge text to read it and will not be able to access content set in a text size that is small or doesn't scale correctly.For optimal readability:

7. Balance

Have you ever looked at someone's design and realized that something here is incomplete? The problem might have been the lack of balance in the composition, a common mistake of young or inexperienced artists. Balance is one of the key principles of design and demonstrates the way visual elements are arranged and harmonized with the other elements in the design, and the composition gives an appearance of properly distributed elements.

Divide your design into 9 equally sized sections, to see if the elements are centered and balanced. If you have an element on the top, you will need to balance it with the element on the bottom.

The balance also decides how much weight each visual element will get. Visual weight refers to how much attention an object draws in a composition. Same elements can draw different attention - it can be made by size, colors or shapes by the object. Good designer knows how keep his work light and not overload it. 

8. Be Organized

The ability to keep all files saved, sorted and clear is equally important, and usually comes with experience, but you can gain that habit from the start.Besides that, the problem most beginners are facing, is not to save their projects. You will most likely need to change something, or use your composition as a template in the future, so try to keep the projects saved, organize them and your footage by folders, name the files properly and it will be much easier to work with!

Conclusion

Additionally, the last tip we would also need to mention, is that you need to keep updated, always check for new tips, tutorials and trends, from typography and new fonts to actual colors. 

And the last cool article we'd advise you to read today, is how to control the eye by design, we're sure that by following all these tips, you will improve your design in many times, as they are essential for every professional designer.