3 Mistakes in Promotional Graphic Design You Should Avoid At All Costs

When it comes to creating a design to be put on your promotional products or even just designing your company’s logo, there’s a lot of effort that goes into decision making. Graphic design is a fast-growing trade that not only takes a lot of skill, but also pays off in the long run when included in other branches of business. However, it is also full of traps that even the most experienced designers fall victim to.

Collaborating with a graphic designer is one of your best bets if you are looking to create a memorable, original, and unique design that will represent your company. But no matter how much we try to explain our ideas while hoping we don’t forget the most important aspects of our vision, there is still the risk of miscommunication. The latter can occur due to numerous external or internal factors – perhaps the designer misunderstood what you were going for, or maybe it was you who forgot to mention you will be printing the design on a spherical object. Then there are, of course, issues with the actual printing process.

Either way, these mishaps happen, and sometimes it’s impossible to avoid them. The easiest way to make sure you’re satisfied with the end result is by constantly checking on the progress that’s been made before you confirm the design. In this article, we will touch upon three mistakes we most commonly encounter.

1. Overly Complicated Design

The message and story behind each graphic design should be very simple and easy to understand. However, what some businesses want to do is tell a story through visuals, which can quickly become a problem. When trying to implement the company’s vision into a logo or other design, there’s only so much that can be done in terms of story-telling. It is sometimes better to give usability of the final product priority over the story – while it’s incredibly important to know what drives a company to achieve their goals, it is nearly impossible to translate that into a small design that will be printed on various promotional products. Why is that?

If we try to implement an insane amount of details into a design that will sometimes only take up a tiny, 2x2cm space on a product, we’re risking having it turn into an unrecognisable blob of colours, lines, and shapes. That’s why it is important to strive for a more minimal design; you can, however, have two designs made – one that will be used for main marketing purposes, and one that will be used in cases where the primary one would be considered too detailed.

2. Abusing the Colour Wheel

When creating works of art of any kind, we’re always encouraged to think outside the box and to create something that’s never been done before. But these encouragements can quickly turn their backs on us when it comes to choosing colours for your design. The easiest way to ensure a safe colour choice is by giving the designer a free hand in picking out those that will work best with not only your business’s niche, but also the design itself.

However, some companies are dead set on certain colours, which is completely fair, as most times they simply want to stay within the colour scheme of their brand. But stubbornness is never a good thing – if we insist on a colour pairing that the designer is strongly advising against, most of the time we should trust them to know what they’re doing, because they do. There’s something called colour psychology, which subconsciously affects your clients opinion on your brand.

3. Sticking to One Single Design

When creating a design, it’s not only good to have a couple of options lined up before choosing your favourite and final one, but it’s also smart to pick two or three you think you’ll want to use. Why is that? Well, not all designs are created equal – some will do best if printed in black and white, others in full colour. The more detailed a design is, the better it will look when printed bigger, and vice versa – the less detailed it is, the better choice it will be when printing it on a small scale on promotional products.

If you can find a design that will embody all of these characteristics, that’s great! But this is incredibly hard to achieve, even if you’re working with the most skilled graphic designer you know of. That’s why you should have a couple variations of your design on hand, which will consistently represent your brand.

Of course, there’s countless other traps to keep an eye out for in graphic design, such as whether you’re designing in the right medium (which depends on where the design will be appearing), and what format the artwork is being saved in. However, as long as you’re working with a professional you know you can trust, you shouldn’t have much to worry about; just remember to ask questions and keep checking up on the progress!