Man is a social animal, you are part of various online/offline communities and if you were me, you’d love to volunteer. I am blessed with a skill of basic graphic designing, so I volunteer often to make some invitations and event announcements.
As I prefer to hand it over to other people, so that I can focus on more important tasks at hand, I thought of sharing about some tips (most of which is commonsense) here.
CONTEXT
- When dealing in a community, highlight is people not events or schedule etc. Use their photos or at least make their names prominent. Other things are secondary when you can empower people by making them feel special.
CONTENT
- Focus on LTD (Location, Time and Date), highlight it so well and keep them in centre of the design so that even IM services offer a cropped square preview (like WhatsApp does), it’s easy to spot what, when and where without opening the actual image.
PAGE
- I personally prefer PowerPoint or Slides or Keys to make flyers because every shape can be individually placed and moved. I then export/save as PNG and share in social media using web.whatsapp.com or messenger.com.
- I personally prefer portrait for quick invites/reminders, because that’s how most people hold their mobile device. If it is meant to be printed, landscape is better option, as landscape designs look greater than portrait ones.
- I find golden ratio look better, so I modify the slide dimensions to follow it.
FONT
- I prefer to use sans-serif fonts in detail, serif in headings, handwriting or cursive in people names
- I layer font-sizes according to prominence so even when writing 10 pm, 10 is big and bold, whereas PM can even be super-scripted.
GRAPHICS
- Ensure any photos are not stretched, proportionate pictures show respect.
- If possible, ensure the overall theme considers colors from the pictures.
- Take consent (read permission) of the involved people before using a picture straight off their WhatsApp display picture or Facebook photos. Especially when it involves a lady.
- Also here are some suggestions about pictures used for business or professional purposes.
- High quality only, zoom in and see if pixelates
- Portrait is preferred, some designs look good in vertical cropping
- Keep faces close and leave plenty of space around
- Dress business formals preferred
- If it is a couple, as usually such invites mention man’s name first and lady’s name next (e.g. Jack and Jill), prefer the photo is taken such that man appears on left
- No/Plain/homogeneous background
- Brighter colors create an instant positive first image, so avoid black color or background hence, pictures taken in daylight help
- Just two of the couple, no kids in photo, unless it is required
- If they are sending a photo, request to send original photo by email, WhatsApp etc reduce quality, feel free to use Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive etc.
COLORS
- Avoid light colour on light background (read about contrast ratio). Make easier to read.
- Using black/very dark background requires bigger fonts because for smaller fonts black on white works better than white on black.
- Use 4-5 colours overall, it’s too much when spotting colours becomes distractions.
DO IT SMART, EMPOWER
- Make yourself replaceable by sharing editable version online like OneDrive PowerPoint Online, Google Drive Slides or iCloud Presentations.
- FYI, if you start design in Google Drive Slides (not importing PowerPoint) then the file does not count towards your storage.
Hope that helps.
Max's Experiments 