Whether you’re a graphic designer or not, we’ve all seen an ad or creative design we’d rather forget. It happens: sometimes wires get crossed, and sometimes the message gets lost in a design made by a committee. But is there a practical way to avoid making mistakes in your approach to graphic design?
Good graphic design is a combination of many different factors, including the use of effective visual hierarchy, the appropriate use of color and the effective use of typography. In general, good graphic design should be able to effectively communicate the intended message to the intended audience, while also being aesthetically pleasing.
As designers, it’s important for us to constantly strive for excellence in our work. Great graphic design not only looks beautiful, but it also effectively communicates a message and serves a purpose.
What makes for good graphic design
10 great graphic design examples
10 examples of bad graphic design technique
Here are a few key factors to consider:
Great graphic design uses visual hierarchy to guide the viewer’s eye and to communicate the most important information first. This can be achieved through the use of size, color and font choices.
Color is a powerful tool in graphic design, and can be used to draw attention, to create mood and to help communicate a message. When used effectively, color can make a design truly stand out.
The choice of font is crucial in graphic design, as it can help to establish a hierarchy of information and add visual interest to a design. Great graphic design uses typography effectively, choosing fonts that are appropriate for the message and the audience.
Overall, great graphic design is a combination of many different factors, all working together to effectively communicate a message and create visually appealing creative work. As designers, it’s our job to constantly push ourselves to create work that is not only beautiful, but also effective and purposeful.
One simple yet effective example of good graphic design is the use of visual hierarchy in a classic poster for a film.
Movie posters traditionally use a large, bold font for the title of the film, and smaller, less bold fonts for the names of the actors and director. This creates a clear hierarchy of information, making it easy for the viewer to quickly understand the most important information on the poster.
Additionally, the use of color on the poster can help to draw the viewer’s attention to certain elements, such as the title of the film, or to create a specific mood or atmosphere.
At its most basic essence, quality graphic design focuses on presenting a clear, yet aesthetically pleasing message. Your design should ensure that:
Below, we’ve provided 10 great examples of graphic design that companies have used Superside to create.
Salesforce was one of Superside’s first 1,000 customers, and they required a big ask from their design team. With a CreativeOps approach, their marketing teams plugged into our design service to help scale their graphic design production as their needs grew.
With this communicative approach, Salesforce was able to use Superside to create a suite of new designs and assets in an efficient and scalable manner.
The key to this graphic design project was communication, one of the most underrated skills in developing quality graphic design elements. If you cannot create an effective communication system between your departments, you will never be able to develop an effective or successful creative process.
Understanding the shortest and most efficient path to success in your business only comes from taking a deep look at your communication processes and how you can make those work for everyone on your team.
Amazon Pharmacy found itself in a unique position during the pandemic. With a large demand for direct-to-consumer medicine, they could provide a unique service thanks to their extensive logistics framework. However, as a new service with very little precedent, they needed to be able to deliver their message to consumers clearly and effectively.
The key graphic design element, in this case, was simplicity. It is very easy for things to become overly complicated within advertising campaigns, and the skill is actually in honing down your graphic design approach and required brand elements to create a clear and effective message.
Using Superside’s design expertise, Amazon Pharmacy was able to present consumers with a clear and uniform advertising campaign that promoted the clarity and effectiveness of their service.
When approaching Superside, Otta had a big ask. Otta’s lean marketing team needed the design capabilities to create effective ads with a short turnaround time. Instead of going through the extensive process of hiring an in-house design team, they used the proven and effective services of Superside to create effective graphic design assets that could share their message.
The key graphic design tip here is prioritization. With a fast-paced business approach, it can be increasingly difficult for design teams to continuously churn out required assets. With an experienced (and scaleable) design service like Superside, companies can keep up with the pace of their business needs.
Offering one of the industry’s most popular design and editing platforms for content creators, Picsart has a strong need for quality, industry-leading design. Additionally, due to their customers’ need for versatile and customizable assets and services, they needed to ensure that their ads and brand presented an open door to content creators from all industries.
Using Superside, Picsart created a versatile and customizable collection of graphics that still retained the unique brand identity of their business yet could appeal to a wide range of consumers.
The key graphic design tip here is that, in design, as long as your core brand elements remain unchanged, feel free to experiment and branch out. Consistency is an important element in brand development and recognition, but it can also hold you back from truly expressing your brand to every available audience.
Imperfect Foods has a strong belief that it’s what’s inside that counts, regardless of whether it’s a fruit, vegetable, or advertisement. As a company experiencing a high amount of growth, Imperfect Foods needed to begin experimenting with its assets to create elements that could be used online, on billboards and even in TV ads.
Using Superside, Imperfect Foods were able to reduce, reuse and recycle its design elements. By creating variations of previous ads, along with introducing motion design, Imperfect Foods was able to use a wide selection of ads that were technically from the same project, but had enough variation to seem unique.
The key graphic design tip here is to reduce, reuse and recycle. If you have an expertly created graphic for an online platform, see how you can repurpose it for physical advertising, animation, or even video. Not only does this create a consistent brand identity throughout your advertising campaigns, but it also saves you a significant amount of time in creative ideation and production.
As customers demand more and more personalization and unique elements in their online experiences, Get Your Guide wanted to create a design experience that ensured that every destination offered a unique and high-quality impression for each customer. Offering travel experiences for thousands of attractions, they needed a workflow that ensured they could implement the highest-quality images and design with a scaleable approach.
Using Superside, they created a unique design template that streamlined the creation process, ensuring that Get Your Guide could present each attraction as a unique and tailored experience.
The key graphic design tip here is that templates are your best friend. If you can create a replicable template that can be customized yet retain your unique brand elements, you can save hours, if not weeks, of time in your design process.
A great example of this is social media posts. Instead of creating unique graphics or carousels for every post, you can create a template that simplifies and standardizes your creative process.
Sometimes, business ideas are very complex to express. Cryptocurrency is a key example: how do you explain the highly complex process of crypto-backed loans in a scaleable and clear manner?
SALT used Superside to distill its key and unique business proposition into simple and effective illustrations and advertisements that could be used in a wide variety of media.
The key graphic design tip here is a picture tells a thousand words. It may seem simplistic, but it’s a process that designers and marketers miss time and time again. If you can creatively instill your business proposition into a simple, replicable drawing, you can create an effective and eye-catching customer experience from the very beginning.
When Mitto approached Superside, they had what I like to call a good problem. As a successful business with extensive reach into a multitude of industries, they needed a holistic design approach that ensured their brand identity was retained in every single ad, graphic, and creative element.
By stripping back their brand guide, they were able to identify the key elements that made their brand unique, ensuring that they reduced their need for longer turnaround times and additional design elements.
The key graphic design tip here is to have a middle-out approach. Don’t fall into the thought process of “we’ll get to that later”. Instead, fully understand your brand design identity and the key elements: that way, it doesn’t matter what the medium is. From hot air balloons to digital ads, if you have a core brand design identity, all you need to know is how big or small you need the ad to be.
When Brio approached Superside, they needed a design service that could implement a brand identity that ideally suited their industry. Brio is a Covid testing logistics company focused on providing reliability and fast turnaround times in an industry that is highly changeable and demands trust and quality.
In creating their brand identity, they focused on industry needs rather than the identity of their own business. Brio developed an aesthetic that created a feeling of trust, quality and reliability, something that is fundamental to Covid and health-related industries.
The key graphic design tip here is to know your industry. You may have the best design idea of your life, but if it doesn’t fit the industry, save it for another day. Ask yourself these questions when creating your graphics:
Once you understand how to develop an emotional response of need in your customer through graphic design elements, your business will flourish. The two key elements that can help you the most with this are color and typography. Luckily for you, we’ve just released articles on both, which you can read on our blog.
In the world of wire-mesh radios and the Internet of Things, sometimes creativity gets left by the wayside. Amol Parikh, Doodle Labs’ VP of Marketing, realized that his company had the unique opportunity to stand out in an often technology-focused industry. Instead of playing it safe and going for mild branding that toed the industry line, Doodle Labs used Superside to create a vibrant and unique brand identity that stood out from the crowd.
The key graphic design tip here is that, sometimes, it’s good to be different. Many companies use industry research, past conventions, and known outcomes to create predictable and “safe” designs. If you have a high-quality product or service that you can shout out loud and proud to the world, then dare to be different.
In a world inundated with conventional design and those keeping up with the pack, you can create a splash for your business by being the difference.
So, you’ve heard all about all the great tips you need to become a top-level graphic designer, but what do you need to avoid? As designers, we all strive to create beautiful, effective and purposeful designs. However, it’s important to also be aware of common pitfalls and mistakes that can result in bad graphic design.
By using a talented Creative-as-a-Service (CaaS), like the graphic designers of Superside, you can guarantee that you receive high-quality graphic design with every brief, regardless of the industry or end goal.
By avoiding these bad graphic design techniques, we can create designs that are effective, engaging, and professional.
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