More Visual Design Principles

Balance and Space

Keeping the elements of your design balanced gives the design some form and stability. Even spacing makes it look professional and attractive, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be symmetrical. It can be asymmetrical, with larger items in the upper left corner balancing out smaller ones in the lower right, and so on.

Leaving open, or negative, space ensures that your visual isn’t cluttered and can highlight the important parts of a design. Brand guides often specify how much space should be left around a logo or other brand elements. 

Font

Design doesn’t stop at the picture. Fonts have everything to do with your audience’s engagement with your communication. Take a look at this font and decide if it’s easy to read:

You can tell what it says; however, reading this font for too long could get tiring, especially on a screen. Is this next font easier to read?

Your audience won’t continue to read your communication if you’ve chosen a font that’s difficult to read. 

In addition to legibility, there’s a question of style. A reader might not take you seriously if you choose a typeface that’s playful like loopy handwriting for professional communications. Choosing a font is a lot like choosing a tone of voice to use when speaking to someone, and it’s important to choose one that aligns with the situation. How do you feel about these lines of text and how they work together?

They’re just words, but they’re very visual; the use of color and different fonts of different sizes draws your attention to the words “dream it” and “do it.”

Graphic artists use a variety of rules to choose fonts and lay them out in a graphic design. This video shows you—very visually—how graphic artists make fonts work as a component of visual media.

You can view the transcript for “Beginning Graphic Design: Typography” here (opens in new window).

Business communicators aren’t necessarily graphic artists, but a good command of a graphic designer’s visual design techniques will help you evaluate your visual media and decide if it’s going to support your message. These aren’t all the visual design principles a graphic designer employs, of course, but they’re a good place to start.