If there's no message, no story, no idea, no narrative, or no useful experience to be had, it is not graphic design.

HAVE A CLEAR MESSAGE.

It's all well and good to experiment with shapes and details and cool effects, but if you simply spackle them all over without considering what they mean and how they support or take away from the message, you end up with a jumbled mass of junk that now longer qualifies as design.

Of the two designs below, which uses excessive elements that detract from the message?

It's fun to experiment with shapes and details, but do they support the main message?

Choose typefaces for specific purposes. Restrain yourself! Too many typefaces are distracting. A single type family with a variety of weights and italics should be enough - don't overdo it!

Check out this terrific chart on mixing typefaces. It was created by a type designer and lecturer Alessandro Segalini.

Focus viewers' attention on one important thing first, and then lead them through the rest. Once you capture the audience with a big shape, a startling image, a dramatic type treatment, or a daring color, steadily decrease the activity of each less important item in a logical way to help them get through it.

H·I·E·R·A·R·C·H·Y

Make the important text more noticeable by using bold, color, or a different font.

Don't just grab some colors from out of the air. Know what the colors will do when you combine them and, more important, what they might mean to the audience. Color carries and abundance of psychological and emotional meaning, and this meaning can vary tremendously between cultural groups. Color affects visual hierarchy, the legibility of type, and how people make connections between elements. Choose colors that are right, not necessarily those that are expected.

If you don't know how color works - you need to learn.

Do a search on COLOR THEORY. Go to the sites below and READ and learn about how powerful color is to a designer.

LESS IS MORE.

That which is less complicated is often better understood and more appreciated than what is more complicated; simplicity is preferable to complexity.

Use common sense: the more stuff jammed into a given space, the harder it is for the average person to see what they're supposed to be seeing. Plus, it's trashy; anybody can load a bunch of stuff onto a dull message and pretend it's a complex work of art.

WHITE SPACE

Space calls attention to content, separates it from unrelated content around it, and gives the eyes a resting place. Negative space is just as important in a composition as positive shapes whether pictures or type.

Type is visual material made up of lines and dots and shapes and textures that needs to relate compositionally to everything else included in the design, no matter how different they seem to be.

Type that cannot be read has no purpose.

TARGET AUDIENCE IS KEY.

Talking to oneself is the domain of the fine artist. A very large audience, not a few people who are "in the know," has to know what you mean with those shapes, that color, and that image you chose.

Create contrasts in density and rhythm by pulling some material closer together and pushing other material further apart. Give the spaces between things a pulse by making some tighter and some looser.

Concentrate areas of extreme dark and light in separate places. Create explosions of luminosity and deep undercurrents of darkness. Counter these with subtler transitions between related values. Above all, make distinctions between light and dark noticeable and clear.

Get your camera out and shoot some photos. Create the images you need and make it the best you can or pay someone else to do it for you. Nothing is more meaningless that a commonly used piece of stock photography or clip art that shows up everywhere. Audiences know cheap clip art - so steer clear of the obvious visual solution.

Have you ever heard the saying, center-set paragraphs of type are only for wedding invitations? Symmetrical visual arrangements are generally static and offer little movement. A symmetrical layout limits a designer's flexibility in pacing and dealing with content that doesn't quite want to fit into the symmetrical mold.

Design is a commentary, opinion, a point of view, and social responsibility. To design is much more than simply to assemble; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to dignify, to persuade and ulitmately to communicate.

Design is both a verb and a noun. It is the beginning as well as the end, the process and the product of imagination. -Paul Rand. from his book Design, Form, and Chaos.