Three Things that Make a Great Layout Design

In this creative studio, I believe that great design is all in how you lay it out. Any design that is laid out in a clear way will accomplish the goal of delivering the message, but I believe there are three things that have to work together in order for this to happen: typography, color, and the design aesthetic of the actual layout. When combined well, a design can produce the best attention-getting, scroll-stopping work. Have you ever been scrolling through Instagram or Pinterest (my go-to places for inspiration) and found something that just stopped you in your tracks? The kind that made you want to click on that image to find out more? That’s the kind of work I’m talking about!

Let’s talk about typography. In scrolling along social media, I sometimes see some great designs that miss the mark because of a trendy font was selected that just didn’t quite match with the brand. The colors were great, the icons were amazing, even the layout was superb. But when it came to the name mark logo, or the text within the design, it didn’t quite deliver.

Or take, for instance, a great collection of projects for a portfolio. The projects were a great show of graphic design craftsmanship, but the layout of the portfolio was just wrong. From selecting “fun” fonts as headers, to colors that a) were too playful or, b) were so difficult to read because of size and/or color choice. These are just two examples of how knowing how to pair things in a harmonious way can make all the difference.

IN USING TYPES

My rule of thumb is less really is more. Designers that know how to use typography correctly usually have a small selection of types from which they work. I heard or read somewhere (I don’t remember which), that a good designer (namely editorial designers) usually only has 12 go-to fonts from which they do their designs (again, mainly for editorial projects). How do they do this? Selecting fonts that have a lot of styles within the type family. For example, my go-to serif type for print is Baskerville because I can choose from regular, italic, semi-bold, semi-bold italic and bold. That’s a lot of variety right there and when used correctly, the hierarchy of use is evident. I am guilty of having a lot of fonts in my font book, but I have found that over the years, I keep coming back to the same ones that are tried and true; they are classic, have a lot of variety and deliver my message in a clear and concise way.

IN USING COLORS

It’s good to know how to use colors correctly and you should understand the difference in using them for print or web. As you know, print uses CMYK and screens (or web) use RGB. Believe it or not, they look very different on your screen versus when you print it out. And how you use those colors in addition to your typography is very important as well. Let’s look at an example. Say the colors below are your brand colors:

Now when you combine them with typography, they might look like this:

The large text looks good, which works for screens, but the smaller text, usually for print, it doesn’t work so well. Your client or their consumers/customers might have to strain to see what they’re reading. Ever go to pick out a product and it has all these really cool colors but when you go to read the label of say, ingredients, you can’t make out what it says? I hate that.

If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you have access to Adobe Color. This cool feature of Adobe helps you select colors (based on your color palette) that work well together. For example, it will let you know if your color combos pass or fail based on the text size and graphic components. If one of the color combinations fail, Adobe will give you color recommendations based on that palette choice that is usually a tint lighter or darker than what you have and work better together. You just select the one you like, and Adobe will provide you with a HEX code with those colors. Here is that same color palette with a darker tint that works better for small and large text.

IN LAYING IT OUT

Grids are your friends here and I cannot recommend InDesign enough for doing this. You can use InDesign for all sorts of things, not just laying out books and magazines. You can design greeting cards, business cards, social media posts (I use it to layout posts in my Instagram account, both in my feed AND in my stories), the list goes on and on. The image layout for the thumbnail of this blog post? I did it in InDesign.

 If you’d like to know how to learn how to use InDesign, you can always check out a class on LinkedIn or Skillshare (if you don’t have a subscription to either, you can usually try it out free for a small period of time). Or, if you’d like to just take a peek and see what it’s all about, I can’t recommend Kelsey Baldwin’s tutorials enough. She has a lot of quick tip videos on her YouTube channel and she’s really great at explaining how to use InDesign.