Hey guys, lately, I have been running into and exposed to a ton of bad design, which is so sad in this day and age when, I mean, I guess it's still out there. In this video, I'm gonna go over some stuff that you definitely wanna avoid and that can really hurt you in promoting your business because they just don't work well. So if you want to understand exactly, you know, where bad design can show up in your business and, what that looks like, you know, kind of train your eye a little bit more, keep watching, 

Okay, we all gotta do some design work around our business. We gotta have good brain. We gotta have a great logo. And today with social media and all the stuff that we're putting out, you know, it's just a constant flow around your business of little design issues that you need to pay attention to. Now there's a couple of things that we just cannot have happen for your business that are so important when it comes to design. And this is not a huge list, but this is stuff I'm running into this week's, which is why I decided to make this video. Illegible graphic design typically takes the form of weird text fonts and poorly positioned stuff. On top of photographic images. A lot of times we see this on social media sometimes even on a website and in print and other areas, and it can just be a full blown disaster. 

It's hard for people to digest. You know, we've gone over on this channel, plenty of stuff like when you're doing headlines and you wanna get somebody, you know, and engage. One of the things, the rules you cannot violate is it's gotta be clear and that visually they need to be digesting this thing at a glance, not trying to like mentally unscramble, what the hell is going on. So be really careful with applying text over images. And, you know, some opacity can help with that, you know, actually editing the underlying image so that it's positioned correctly, you know, like subjects on the right text, on the left, something like that, right. To, to clean things up and make it clear. Um, but that's a, that's a, that's a danger zone for most amateur designers is trying to do text on images. So if you're gonna avoid it, avoid it. 

And if you, you know, you just keep getting kind of dicey results, get somebody professional involved to help you do those types of pieces. Okay. Now the other one is like the sister of that problem, which is a bunch of janky fonts all over the place. So more than two fonts on a page starts to get weird. Um, you know, like just trying to be all, I don't know what with coming up with a bunch of font, selections and stuff, your brand should have its primary font as part of its branding, uh, typically shown and represented to some degree in the logo or tagline. And then that should carry through all of your marketing pieces. You should just have your font that you work with, and there's no reason to start getting creative and slapping three fonts on an ad or, or, or a social post or anything like that just starts looking, you know, it starts looking like kindergarten or something. 

Okay. So watch out for that, be careful with fonts. They're the danger zone and professionals know that because fonts are so important as a professional designer, but folks that are, you know, just doing it, um, in the hobby level, if you will, or getting out of their lane, you know, their business owner, but they're gonna think they're gonna do this stuff. And, you know, they can just get into a thing where it just starts looking ugly basically, and also hard to read, which is even worse. Okay. And the last one is using any sort of imagery in your marketing that, you know, and this is like, I wanna qualify this statement because psychologically people are moved by avoiding pain. So we know that that that helps with conversions. But from an image standpoint, we really don't wanna have negative type images, uh, tied to our brand. 

So you need to be careful with the images that you use around your branding. Now you can use a, a contrarian or provocative negative outcome image in advertising. You know, like some, somebody who's sad because they didn't take action. That that's a different thing. But what I'm saying like is on your webpage and stuff, just be careful with keeping the vibe upbeat and positive and looking at the design from this one perspective, I'm gonna leave with you guys. The design of these pages should show the results or the meaning, the results of working with your product or service. And that hopefully means a joyful outcome, right? So the whole thing should feel that way, that if I work with this company or if I buy this product, this wonderful positive result that I'm getting exposed to can happen to me. Right? So that's just a big, high level analysis, but a lot of times we'll see some negative images and imagery sneak in and you really just wanna avoid that stuff. 

And I guess there's one more that I've seen recently too, that's a little scary, too many colors or no contrasting color. So everything just kind of looks, uh, bland, like three shades of blue. That's not really helping anybody. Right. So we wanna have like two or three primary brand colors and those two contrasting colors, which we've talked about on another video. So watch out, don't turn the whole thing into like some sort of finger painting, exercise, right. Be clean and crisp with your colors. Use those contrasting colors for your calls to action and so forth. Okay. We'll see you guys on the next video. Go ahead and like this video dig around on the channel, cuz there's a lot of stuff on here on good design and just be careful out there and you know what - it doesn't hurt to just ask for super professional help.