10 Warning Signs that You’re Doing Graphic Design in New Orleans Wrong

A clean design for advertisements or a website can do a great service to expanding your business prospects.

Whether you plan on doing it yourself or hiring a graphic designer from New Orleans there are a few things you should consider to ensure the best outcome for your designs and business in general.

Clearly Described Instructions

When working with a professional graphic designer you should do your best to make it clear what it is you want your designs to convey about your business.

While it’s good to have a well fleshed out idea though, be ready for feedback from experienced designers that can help you refine your ideas into something more professional and up to modern standards.

To describe clearly what you would like out of your design to ensure the designer is set on the right path and in tune with your business so their recommendations can evolve in a way that reflects your business image.

Over Use of Different Fonts

If you do intend to do your own design, one big tip is to keep the number of fonts you use to a minimum.

Readers are slowed down in the change between fonts, which can be used to provide emphasis on certain words essential to your promoting of your business but can also be a fatal flaw that makes your design unappealing and annoying to read through.

It’s best to find one or two fonts that fit the mood of your company and stick to those throughout the entirety of your website.

Too Wordy

When it comes to getting people’s attention with graphic designs, less is often more.

Words clutter up design and can fall short on leaving a lasting impact on viewers.

Logo design in New Orleans needs to convey the message as fast as possible while being unique and recognizable.

Perhaps while your business is building up you may have a simple logo design paired with a company or product name, but the ideal is a simple design that customers recognize and understand the meaning of.

In general when designing any visual medium, a rule of thumb is that if you can portray it without words, you should portray it without words, a picture is worth a thousand words after all.

Negative Space and/or Lack Thereof

It’s an easy urge to follow to just want to maximize your utilized space.

And while it is possible to jam even more details on the home page, it really isn’t a good idea to clutter things up and it will make websites look tacky and unserviceable.

The same rule extends to business cards, posters or any visual medium.

Negative space is an essential element to draw attention to what is really important.

Take for example the well-trekked Google page and all that glorious white that leads you straight to what you came for.

Over Designing and/or Too Many Elements

Again and again, we need to hammer home that simplicity and lack of clutter is essential for sending a clear and concise message before losing a viewer’s attention.

This is where a freelance graphic designer can help an amateur really trim out the fat if they’re finding it difficult to simplify while still getting the point across.

Design Trends and Fads

While it can seem wise to pull influence from new successful trends when it comes to website design, and it can work in some cases, it can also date your website and other design elements to a period that can become dated and tacky.

It’s better to find your own style which may incorporate some modern trends but should have its own flair to stand out and set out a lasting tone that won’t need to be redesigned every five years.

Raster Graphics

If you’re not familiar with the tools used to design logos and other image materials intended to show up on a variety of mediums you’ll want to do some learning about raster versus vector graphics.

The quick explanation is that raster graphics can have problems when scaled to a resolution outside of their original rendering leading to pixelation or general lack of clarity of the image.

Vector graphics are rendered with professional design software to scale significantly better to any size that you may use from website icons up to billboard logos.

If you do stick to using raster graphics you may want to render your base image in high resolution and scale it down for smaller applications.

Of course, it will always be best to use proper design software or consult a freelancer to translate your logo through professional software into a vector image.

Hiring A One Note Designer

While looking through portfolios of work, it’s best to avoid designers who’ve shown an overall lack in diversity to their designs.

Even if their design style that they do perform is well suited to what you want for your image you may find that the freelance designer may be lacking in talent to meet specific requests.

A one-note portfolio is a sign of a quickly mocked up portfolio or the designer taking shortcuts to produce content at a rapid pace.

This can lead to your design being crude or cookie cutter.

Unclear Message

When forming a brand you need to make hard-line decisions on image and style.

It’s best to find something successful and repeat it over and over again to create a brand resonance that people remember.

You may want to try out different styles to appeal to different target audiences but it’s usually more successful to stick to the tone that works the best for your core audience or you may lose what makes your brand actually appeal to its core demographic.

“Straight Quotations and Apostrophes”

Most software you use nowadays won’t run into this problem as it’ll auto format your apostrophes and quotation marks so that they have directionality.

While this can be trivial, it is noteworthy in its ability to avoid confusion and make the material more easily read.

So unless your brand image really calls for making a habit of the old plain straight up and down quotations, you may want to make sure you’re in the habit of getting proper “quotes and end quotes”.

Getting Someone who Knows Good Designs When They See One

If you need further aid with managing your design elements from logos to full-blown website design and their curated content, contact Infinitech Designs, a local New Orleans SEO and design specialist with over a decade of experience in making local businesses put their best foot forward.