As the world of internet users copes with remote work and social distancing by jumping online, businesses have the opportunity to show up and be seen on the web. If you want to make the best impression possible, you need to know the basics of great graphic design.
On August 12, we invited Tori Hauser — partner and director of creative services at Tarot Creative — to present her talk, “Graphic Design Best Practices & Tools.” Tori has 18 years of experience in design and advertising, making her a great resource for anyone looking to improve their design game, during and after COVID-19.
Here are her best tips and suggested tools for creating great designs without a ton of technical skills.
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As the world of internet users copes with remote work and social distancing by jumping online, businesses have the opportunity to show up and be seen on the web. If you want to make the best impression possible, you need to know the basics of great graphic design.
On August 12, we invited Tori Hauser — partner and director of creative services at Tarot Creative — to present her talk, “Graphic Design Best Practices & Tools.” Tori has 18 years of experience in design and advertising, making her a great resource for anyone looking to improve their design game, during and after COVID-19.
Here are her best tips and suggested tools for creating great designs without a ton of technical skills:
Basic design
To give you a strong foundation for your creative work, Tori highlights five major design elements that you should pay close attention to:
- Layout and composition: These are the building blocks of design. They help you attract and engage customers, while helping them understand your message.
- Color: Color can be associated with certain words or feelings, like how blue represents security and black feels high-end.
- Fonts: Fonts — which include serif, sans serif, script and display fonts — can communicate feelings and themes.
- Pictures: A picture is worth a thousand words, so everything from your lighting to your subjects can describe your business’ atmosphere.
- Hierarchy: Grouping things together in your design, in order of rank, can tell people where to look first and make designs less chaotic.
Graphic design tools
Now that you know the five key elements of design, you need the right tools to start creating designs of your own. Here are the free (and mostly free) tools that Tori recommends.
Photography
When you’re in search of free, beautiful stock images, Tori suggests using:
Fonts
These huge catalogs of fonts can help you find the perfect fit for all your design needs:
Tori specifically recommends Google Fonts and Font Squirrel if you’re working on your website design, since they offer web-safe fonts.
Design tools
Perhaps the most important tools of all are the ones that help you put your entire design together. Tori recommends Snappa and Canva, which are both easy-to-use platforms for beginners in design.
Snappa is a particularly simple site that offers great templates for infographics and social media. To help you customize your designs, Snappa lets you choose from its photo and icon libraries and convert designs to new sizes easily.
Canva is a much more robust design tool that offers a huge variety of print and digital templates. In addition to using free graphic elements, Canva allows you to pay for premium options and upload your own photos.
On Canva, you can:
- Create a Brand Kit with your colors, fonts and logos to keep designs consistent.
- Create interactive designs, like Instagram Stories that include music, GIFs and videos.
- Pay for flyers that Canva will print and ship to you. You may need to slightly adjust your design before requesting a print, since Canva will resize your design to account for margins.
The only thing Tori recommends against designing on Canva is your company logo, since the tool doesn’t export vectors. Otherwise, you can have fun designing your heart out!