How to avoid overcrowding your marketing pieces

How about a little design advice to help you with your marketing projects? Now I’m definitely not the only expert in this subject matter, but I have worked on A LOT of projects, so I’ve gathered a few tips and tricks along the way that make life easier when it comes to designing marketing pieces.

The first tip thing I do when I’m designing any type of marketing piece is that I always start with a very simple grid and from there, I play around with it. And the reason why I start with a simple grid that I know will work is that if I make a mistake or go to far down the design rabbit hole (which trust me, this can happen very easily), I know that I can always fall back on my simplified design that got the job done, looked polished and professional.

So here are my tips on making sure that you aren’t overcrowding your marketing graphics.

Avoid having too many elements

Probably the most common layout mistake I see novice designers make is overcrowding their marketing communication pieces with type and images. While it may be tempting to include ALL of the information into one graphic, it may actually work against you. Including too many elements, type sizes and images will overcrowd your piece, which will make it harder for your audience to read and understand the main purpose of the message. Instead, try thinking of one or two pieces of information that you’d like your reader to focus on in the graphic, and build all of your elements around that.

2. Create enough breathing room around elements

Have you ever jammed packed all of your information into a small space and thought - this just doesn’t feel right? That’s probably because you haven’t left enough breathing room around your type and images. But that’s okay - this is any easy issue to fix. The next time this happens in any of the graphics you are creating, just add a bit more space around all of your elements. Unfortunately there isn’t one spacing rule that applies to all marketing pieces, but you will have a better understanding of how much space is enough with time. And if you find that you don’t have enough room for everything, don’t worry. You can always make your single social graphic into a carousel, or add another page to your downloadable pdf.

Avoid using all caps for long sentences and paragraphs

Using all caps can be really tricky and as a general rule, should only be used for headlines and short subheadings. Although all caps can look really sleek in marketing pieces, especially when using a thin sans-serif font, they are actually harder to read for most people, and in some cases, will look like the words are being overemphasized. Using capital letters also means that you need to adjust the leading of your paragraphs (the space between each line of copy), which can also be a tricky technique to use. Therefore it’s best to use sentence case for long lines of copy in marketing pieces (your body copy) and keep the all caps for punchy headlines.

Choose one big visual element to highlight

This could either be an image or it could be text - but it can’t be both. this is an especially important technique to use if you are designing something small like a social media graphic.

Start with large margins and add plenty of space around your design elements

This includes photos, illustrations and icons. If you start off with large margins and stick to those margins you will most likely not bring your elements to the edge and will automatically give your graphic the breathing room it needs.

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