Whether you’re designing graphics for blog posts, online ads, social media platforms or involved in designing an invitation for some event, you’ll need to create an awesome presentation that impresses your target audience.

There is a massive but versatile application of graphic design. From font pairing and scale, to alignment and white space, the facets of the design world are complex.

You don’t need a degree in graphic design whether you are a student, a business owner, or an employee in any industry. All you need to do is get acquainted with some standard best practices – a reason why you will be facing the need to read up on graphic design tips at one point or another to be on your way to producing awesome graphics for all your online needs.

Here, we have put together 15 graphic design tips that all designers need to know to get through the intricacies of the creative process.

1- Choosing and limiting the typefaces

Remember, when it comes to typefaces you should ensure their clarity, since it is one of the most important aspects of design. When choosing a typeface or font for headings, subtitles and body text, use easy to read fonts for simple but effective graphic design. The eye finds it hard to scan multiple typefaces, so it would be better if you stick to a simple collection of fonts.

Making the text unreadable for the sake of visual appeal, might make you unable to achieve considerable success with the project. You’ll find many guides that tell you to use diverse typefaces in a single design, but don’t take that advice literally. The viewer will have difficulties adjusting his eye to different styles and forms, which is why it would be best to use variants of the same font family.

Don’t limit all your designs to a single font either. Experiment a little and find the perfect style for the project you’re working on. You don’t want to stick to the boring default fonts when there are so many opportunities to explore.

2- Careful with the spacing of other elements

Use letter spacing to fill dead space, aligning text, or condense words that take up too much space. However, be cautious not to decrease letter spacing so much it ceases to be readable, or increase it so much the letters become detached from one another.

3- Be crafty with the colors

Select a color scheme that has 1-3 primary colors and another 1-3 secondary colors that contrast and complement each other. Use different tones of the same color for uniformity by fine-tuning brightness for contrast. Go for the colors that grasp the mood you aim for.

For example, green reminds people of peace, freshness, and nature, while deep blue can be mystical, intriguing, or even depressing. Look at your favorite product packaging. What are the color combinations on a store shelf that attract your attention? Analyze how cohesive the design is and try to achieve the same impression. The Adobe Color CC online tool will help you choose a nice palette for your design.

4- Making it simple

Ever seen a movie with too many special effects – explosions, speeding spaceships, giant robots, and so on. Sometimes these special effects just blur together effectively muting out most of what’s going on elsewhere in the movie.

It might not be a good analogy but the same can be said about your design. If you overdo it with too many special effects like, you will risk creating a bloated and aesthetically muted image.

You can still use some design “special effects”. But sprinkle them by the handful onto your design, as you might with a bit of balsamic vinegar on a salad. Too much balsamic and it negates the salad. And too many special effects and it negates the rest of your design.

Keep it simple, all the while not forgetting your basics. Ensure that every element has a reason to be in the design and have the number of fonts, colors, shapes and frames to a minimum. Use contrasting tonal color combinations so that the text is sharp and easy to read.

5- Creativity and originality

Make the best use of your creative abilities and graphic design skills to create original graphics. Be innovative and experimental all the while choosing and combining different typefaces and filters. Avoid trends while creating designs to correspond with your own inimitable style, leaving a personal stamp on your work that makes anyone who sees it, recognize you.

6- Research before initiating work on the project

You should possess all the details required before you begin to write or create. Study, read, research, resource. Whether it’s materials or information and facts, the course of research will surely ensure a more thought-out result.

7- Think outside the box

The most creative people have a tendency of thinking outside the box. Don’t use the typical icons and symbols you see everywhere to showcase your topic. Research, sketch and print to find new and original icons to visually communicate with your audience.

8- Brighten up your graphics to take full advantage of contrasts

Contrast is one of the most imperative parts of design for mood, legibility and using contrasts helps to add “attitude” to your design, along with making certain elements stand out. There are plenty of ways to generate contrasts too.

You can use contrasting colors, fonts, or even contrast amounts of space between items in your design to enhance the positive/negative space in an image or apply black or white to copy to create optimum contrast against a background image.

Think about it in a real-world context too and you’ll see why this makes sense. A seven-foot-tall person (wrestler Andre the Giant, for example, or basketball player Yao Ming) get attention simply because they contrast with the general population. Moreover, the same holds true for contrasting elements in your design as well.

Creating drama and impact with attention gripping graphics makes sure that your colors don’t bleed together since you are choosing hues that contrast against one another.

9- Be equipped with a notebook always

Whether on the go, at work or about to fall asleep, inspiration can come at any time so it’s important to be ready. Keep a digital or otherwise paper notebook to draw and scribble down notes and ideas. You can refer to them when the time to get in the creation phase comes.

10- Align your objects

This helps keeping the design elements in a presentable order, regardless of their differing sizes. Proper alignment is the easiest way to give your images a sophisticated and professional look.

11- Use icons to support your message

Icons are like black pepper. They can be sprinkled on top of which ever design you’re cooking up. The icons surely add extra spice to your design, ensuring that it really “tastes” great.

12- Plan your design

Rather than beginning to plan as the first essential step, the average non-designer only begins to think seriously about their plans for a design AFTER they’re well into the design process and going back is not possible.

The planning stage doesn’t need to be long. As a matter of fact, it can just be a minute or two. But if you know what you want to achieve before you initiate designing, you’ll get things done at a much quicker pace.

13- Always Keep the target audience in mind

Unless you are engaging in the graphic designing endeavor purely for personal enjoyment, you’re most probably designing to cater to a specific audience. You should make it a point to never forget the “who” that you’re designing for. This ensures you create something that the intended audience for your design wants to see and something they’ll react favorably to.

Context matters here. A dark, grimy, creepy looking design – for instance – wouldn’t be the sort of thing you’d want to have on a website for a chic, expensive product. The same would hold true of course, with a design that feels too “childish” (in its light colors, use of squiggly lines, cartoons, etc.) for a mature adult audience.

14- Observing and Analyzing

It is always advisable to take some time to observe your collection of designs. Each infographic, illustration, or icon you look at contains lines, shapes, text, and other elements that are combined in a masterful way.

The process of carefully analyzing different designs will help you realize how the tips you read are implemented into practice. As you develop better skills with your own designs, you’ll start guessing what tools master designers have used to create elements.

15- Use lines to create a sense of order

Lines help anchor items in an image and help create a sense that there is an overall order. You can use lines in your image by putting them around blocks of text – there by anchoring the text.

You can also put lines as “separators” between various elements in the image. In this case, the sense of elements being separated furthers the feeling of planning and coordination in the design.