7 Mistakes Amateur Graphic Designers Make in Their Career

In the design industry experience outshine qualifications. Graduating from a top designing college can be the best thing you can choose for a better career. But for inexperienced and freshers can make mistakes as a graphic designer.

And here are common graphic designers mistakes:

1. Thinking more outside the box

This may look illogical but give a thought for it. Designers spend more time and break head on the concept to showcase too many bells and whistles—an easy way to keep design principles like balance, space and hierarchy in mind. Your designs must be modest, unique and adaptable.

Clients’ time gets wasted when designers lose track of the client’s vision and objectives. So keep on track and ensure you satisfy client needs and produce a unique set of designs.

2. Zero ideas behind right typography

Choosing the right typography trend that goes with colour and overall design is vital. Unfortunately, most freshers experimenting with new designs end up using the wrong font type and style. Create some basic rules on how you would choose the right font depending on designs and requirements.

Limit yourself in the font families you use in a single project and take care of font-weight and match the tone of the brand’s message with the font. For some font is just for visually distinguishing text. But for customers, it is only about getting personality and action to their brand at first look. You need to learn typographic terms that designers should know.

3. Overused stock images

Hiring a professional photographer can be costly. So most designers choose stock images. But this process should be done carefully because you may end up using overused stock images that people have already seen. The design may look great but will end up being unoriginal.

So the best thing you can do is when you are downloading images try to avoid most popularly used ones. Look for less downloaded photos. You can also look out on InspirationFeed free stock images.

4. Fail to understand client’s needs

Most freshers are excited, they showcase all their skills and talent and put clients’ needs last. A fresher or an experienced professional needs to work well with clients and produce work that meets clients’ needs. This is important for a long career in the design industry. Designers should evade creating a generic template and use designing concepts. It destroys designers standard and quality.

Ensure you always read out the brief and eradicate recycling designs and plagiarising client projects with low-quality ideas.

You need to know the professional IT practices to understand client requirements and make them comfortable communicating with you. According to many experts, it is required for any leaders to make use of their Emotional Intelligence and leadership skills to create trust. Encouraging clients and other team members are vital in any profession.

5. Selling shot

Accepting a project that enables you to use your skill set fully is an excellent opportunity to learn something in this real-world scenario. Most freshers are scared of experimenting with new things. If they feel that clients ‘ requirements are inexperienced they won’t accept the project.

Try to avoid that because nothing in life comes with experience. You have to experiment with your skills and satisfy customer needs. If you stick to your limited skills, your work will always be just ok. Your clients may not get enough clients also.

Know your abilities, not only technical skills. But your skills and strength. It enables you to add value to your projects. You may be skilled in photoshop or any other skills. Apply them and create unique designs which clutch your customer’s eyes.

Try to stay focused on work and developing new ideas. Applying novel ideas into a project in a short time showcases you as a professional graphic designer. And it is a must skill because when you step to the next level of position in a career, you need to balance multiple projects and meet deadlines.

Without delay, generating a pool of ideas while others are still planning for the first idea is worth exploring. This also helps you when assigning roles mentioned earlier, knowing your greatest contribution puts you in the most excellent success with your projects.

6. Not focusing on plagiarism

Plagiarism must be strictly counted while creating designs. It is an unethical and unprofessional act in any industry. It is not at all accepted to reproduce someone else’s designs and use it as yours.

You may also face a specific legal crisis if things go out of hands. You may lose potential clients in this case. None of the clients would like to hire someone to copy-paste other’s work.

7. Less focus on proofreading

Forgetting to proofread your work before finalizing is one of the most common mistakes graphic designers make. Showcasing a work full of errors is a big failure on the designer’s part. Using various graphic design tools, designers must manually proofread and check if work is error-free and rectify them before delivering.

The Other Mistakes to Avoid

Here are other mistakes an Amateur Graphic designers make in their career:

Focusing on trends

A design must be able to withstand at all times. Following trends is a must to stay in the market. If you deliver old traditional techniques, there is a high chance that clients may not turn up for your work.

Ignoring the contract

Not signing a contract can turn out to be a disaster for the designers. If there are no legal documents, there are chances clients may quickly leave without paying designers. A written contract is vital as it joins both the parties to be loyally involved in a reliable business.

Lack of communication

Not having proper communication with clients can also be a drawback in graphic designers. The client may need to convey some changes, but it may be a hindrance with a lack of communication from the designer’s side. So it is essential designers should know how to treat their clients.

Overlooking the audience

Most projects’ objective is to produce a design that will be addressed at the client’s target audience. Neglecting the audience is a common mistake. Ensure that your design is targeted towards the right audience.

The Graphic Design Tips You Need to Know

Best graphic designing tips for beginners:

Tip 1

While choosing typeface or font for headings, subtitles, and text, easily readable fonts create effective graphic design. It can be hard to scan different typefaces, so stick to a simple set of fonts.

Tip 2

Apply scale to type, shapes or compositional features that need proportionate importance. Use specific colours to improve this method while making proper typefaces that look good when increased size. Raleway for the word ‘Scale’ is strong and bold with precise forms.

Tip 3

Select a colour scheme with 1-3 primary colours plus 1-3 secondary colours that complement one another. Use various tones of the same colour consistency by altering brightness for contrast.

Tip 4

Improve the contrast by modifying the background image’s brightness to offset the text colour, making the design clear and simple to read. This is the best way to apply white or black text on the images to create a definite effect.

Tip 5

Keep design simple but do not forget basic structure and rules. Ensure every element has an objective in the design and keep a number of fonts, colours, shape and frameless. Using contrasting tonal colours for text is sharp and simple to read. Creating a significant edge to hold your copy will improve the structure of a design.

Tip 6

Apply your creative ideas and skills to accomplish original designs. Be unique and experimental. Select and mix different typefaces and filters.

Tip 7

Create a design by surrounding words with white space to let elements flow. Using space around text boxes and images make designs more comfortable to read. It attracts attention more than cluttered composition.

Tip 8

Researching before designing is a smart way of knowing what is trending and what is needed for creating unique designs. Have all the necessary details before beginning to develop. Study and research. It may be materials, objects, information or facts the research is essential for guaranteed thought out results.

Tip 9

Contrast is an essential part of the design and to make it stand out in the market. Use contrasting colour palette background, fonts and graphics. Make use of photo filters to improve the positive/negative space in a picture. Apply black and white to copy to create maximum variation against a background image. The best rule is if you use a light coloured background, then you should use the dark font and vice versa.

Conclusion

As a beginner, it is common that you will make a few mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up for it. The important thing is to learn from these mistakes. Learn and grow from your errors to get more projects and make a solid career in Graphic designing.

About the Author

Jane is an upcoming educator and co-founder of the Top My Grades. She specializes in arts and design related assignments, Expert Assignment Help will help students with their graphic design projects and animations. She has also collaborated with professional developers and web designers, having industry experience along the way. Beyond work, you can find her with a sketchbook, doodling away or writing poetry.

Image Credit: Photo created by jannoon028 – www.freepik.com