Thursday, April 1, 2010

What Makes a Good Design?

A good design, whether its straight artwork or some form of advertising, sells or conveys whatever the producer was trying to sell or convey. There are structural rules you can employ to make the overall appearance of what you're doing pleasing to the eye. There are other tricks that can be employed to elicit certain emotional responses. Understanding and employing either of these two camps can get you half way there, but half way isn't always good enough.


Believe it or not, the structural rules have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. These rules have to do with balance, proportion, symmetry, grid structures, and oddly enough, deviation from all of the above. Visually, people like things broken into thirds, laid out in grid patterns, or arranged in triangular formations. Most people don't even realize that they're looking at such things.


Anyone can study these guidelines. There are tons of books out there. You could sit in an art museum all day and study the commonalities contained in each piece that really stand out to you. It wouldn't take you long to discover these often overlooked structures. You don't have to have a great love of art or even a long history of artistic ability to tap into these concepts, but it doesn't hurt either.


Learning the structure will get you most of the way there. Of course, I've met people that have college degrees that couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, and people that have never even thought of these structures before and design beautifully. Sometimes design talent is like gymnastic ability, some of us have it and some don't (I can't do a head stand to save my life).


The other emotional marketing tricks are pretty easy to understand, but they're also often incorrectly used. People like to see people in their advertising. People like babies, cute animals, and of course, sex always sells. These ideas have to be used appropriately. Here are some examples of using these ideas incorrectly:


After a few weeks of working with the client, we had a campaign narrowed down to two or three consistent looking ads that they were going to run. The only thing that had to be finalized was a photo they were going to take to showcase their store. Since they were selling furniture, we expected a photo of… get this, furniture. Instead we received a photo of their granddaughter sitting on a couch. When we asked why the child was the obvious focus of the photo, they indicated that they wanted to showcase their love of family. There was already a line in the ad that indicated 'family owned and operated.' If you want to sell furniture, you need to emphasize your great furniture.


Another example: Within weeks of the recent Financial Bailout of large banks, we received a request for a logo/mascot design. A small, local bank was trying to expand their loan department. They requested that we use a cartoon because people like cartoons. The problem was, they wanted a cartoon monster alongside the phrase "Loan Monster." People were already upset with banks. A monster is generally a negative thing. We pleaded with them to let us come up with something else.


Some of the other common mistakes:


Most people don't realize, and most advertising sales people won't tell you, you have about 2 seconds to get someone's attention, and possibly another five to re-engage them and keep them. Another words, even the best designed advertising is likely only effective for mere seconds, if you're lucky, you might get a minute.


If you try to cram too much information into one advertisement, you won't sell or convey anything. People will give up on trying to take it all in. It's very common for a potential viewer to glance at an ad and immediately perceive too much text. If you have paragraphs of info, you'll likely cut your effectiveness by half right off the bat. You want to keep things simple, make a fast impression.


Color is a great thing to include in any design, art or ad. That doesn't mean the more colors the better. You want a color scheme. That might only be three colors that make sense together.


Colors elicit their own emotional responses too, and you have to keep that in mind. If your bank runs an ad all in red, people tend to make negative associations with the color red and their finances. Green is tricky when you're working on restaurant ads. Green can easily make people think of spoiled food.


Fun fonts are great, but you have to use them responsibly. No one wants to read more than a word or two when Old English is the font. Too many fonts in your design can make things look so disconnected, no one will try to piece it all together. You'll likely miss your critical two seconds.


Time can be a design's best friend. Rushing things will make things look rushed. One of my college instructors taught us that a good design is never 100% finished. You can always make little tweaks here and there, apply new skills or ideas. Sometimes a design has to be mined, chipped away through trial and error. Sometimes the creative mind needs to chew on an idea for a while. That doesn't mean that changes should be made for the sake of making changes.



Both of these ads aren't too bad. They both have strong calls to action with consistent looking use of fonts. Both of them are pretty simple. We don't have tons of text to read.


The one on the left is on the verge of having too many colors, but it helps that each character's color also splits the ad into four horizontal sections. Vertically it is split into three sections, two of which are triangular. The colors do repeat above and below the dividing bar, which helps the balance a bit. The images they chose make perfect sense because they're advertising a movie, you would want photos from the movie included. The images help portray what the movie is about. You know this is a superhero movie even though it doesn't come right out and say that with words.


The ad on the right has a great, simple color scheme with purple and green dominating. It highlights benefits and has a call to action. I think I would have centered or evenly divided the two points in the top of the ad, but I think this is the better of the two ads. The only image they chose to use is their logo.


So, for a good design, you have to learn to balance all of these things. You want to sell or compel a simple main point with balanced color, fonts, and appropriate images. If you give a decent graphic artist a fair amount of time, balancing all these things shouldn't be too hard for them.

1 comment:

  1. Dude,
    This is awesome. Super helpful stuff for a wannabe like me. This is the kinda stuff I was hoping you would teach when I kept bugging you about helping me learn design. Trial and error works but when you add that with a more solid foundation and I'll up and running!

    Thanks for the thoughtful post sharing some of your expertise!

    ReplyDelete