Simple Design Tips for Non-Designers

Web design is an interestingly unique skill. Due to its infancy, it is a career in which many professionals have very little formal training. Designers may not have training in programming and programmers rarely have training in design. As much as I understand and appreciate design, I'm more of a programmer at heart. My design skills aren't very impressive. I've picked up a few little tricks over the past few months that I thought others more inclined to programming may find useful.

I've prepared the following quick list of tips that I've found useful in improving my design skills and appreciation of design. In some cases, I'm very aware that there are industry standard terms, but the point of this isn't to teach a full course on typography or color theory, but rather to provide some simple tips that can be used as a starting point for improving some basic design skills.

Don't Underestimate the Power of Typography

Experiment with different line-heights, letter-spacing, and word-spacing with your headlines and body text. Try using all uppercase in some situations. You may not realize it at first, but those kind of changes play a huge role in your visual design as well as readability. I'm not just talking about headlines either. Experiment with your body text fonts and spacing. You'll be amazed at the improvements. If you'd like to learn more, I strongly suggest the more detailed explanation of typography by Mark Boulton and Cameron Moll's advice on typeface selection.

Discover & Understand Your Unique Style

All too often, new designers look at other designer's for inspiration. This can definitely be useful, but is much more useful after you understand your own style. Embrace the way you design and what works for you before you try to draw inspiration from someone else's style.

When designing for clients, you always want to put their design needs before your style. However, it's alright for that design to have hints of your style. It's what makes your designs unique. Focus on their business needs first and determine what is appropriate. If you know yourself, you'll be able to use your own style better as a result.

Start Simple

If you want to really polish your design skills, try designing for a little while without extra graphics or photos. This forces you to have a better understanding of how the more subtle design elements work together to achieve their own state of zen. If there's no graphics, all you can worry about is typography, color, and layout. If that's all you've got to work with, you better bet you'll learn to understand your choices on a slightly deeper level.

Use a Variety of Colors

Finding the right colors can be difficult as well. Once you find them though, they can help a design fall right into place. Many new designers have a hard time using the right amount of colors. I've found the sweet spot to be around 4-5 colors not including black or white. They don't have to be completely unique colors, but you should at least try using different shades of a color. For example, Jon Hicks has always done this exceedingly well with different greens. If you need help picking out a color palette, find a photo you like and pixelate it. Using different colors helps add another layer of variety and interest.

Content is King

Trying to design without content is like trying to drive a car without fuel. You can't get anywhere. Pieces of content are your design. Whether it's body text, headlines, dates, photos, or graphics, if you don't have content to drive the design, you're going to have a rough time. I always start off with more content elements than I need and then start cutting them as I realize they aren't needed.

Start Big

Start out with your big elements first. Figure out a high level layout that makes sense for your content. Then once you have the page laid out, you can pick one piece of content at a time and figure out the details. Try designing just that one piece without any regard for the surrounding elements. This lets you focus and not get distracted by trying to do too much at once. Besides, you can always integrate all the pieces back together in the end. Also, when working on layouts, make sure you are very aware of how the reader's eye will move across the page. There should be one emphasis, with other parts that smoothly and seamlessly guide the eye across your design.

Worry About Details at the End

If you start designing your graphic bullets before you've even chosen a logical page layout or color scheme, you're getting ahead of yourself. Of course, you may find that the layout or color scheme need to change later, but that's alright. Just keep moving forward. Iron out the details after you've taken care of the big stuff.

Rapid Fire Design / Keep it Moving

If you sit there designing for hours and are never happy, that's just how it goes. You'll always be your toughest critic, and the longer you look at your work, the less you're going to like it. In these situations, I'll timebox myself. I give myself 10 minutes and force myself to work as fast possible to create a basic design. Then I repeat it a few more times until I have several to compare. During this process, I don't undo anything, I just keep it going and force myself to make happy mistakes. Don't let yourself get hung up on pixels or details, just make some sort of forward progress.

Summary

These are by no means meant to be a deeply professional and highly profound series of rules. I chose not to try to explain kerning, leading, gutters, or any of that. I just wanted to throw out some basic tips that have helped me improve my design chops or break out of irritating ruts.

Author : Garrett