White Space

I am sure I have mentioned the importance of white space before, but as the holiday seasons approach clients want to fill their ad spaces with holiday specials and other information, and most of the time you can send a better message if you just cut the

CRAP

Keep your customer's attention by focuses it on one or two promotions (depends on ad dimensions). Verbal vomit and plethora of holiday graphics will not make your ad stand out in the sea of other ads doing the exact same thing. Simply by allowing dramatic white space and bring you more attention then LARGE ALL-CAP LETTERS IN RED and flanked in holly, especially when all the other ads look the exact same. Readers/customers will just pass it over.  

It can be hard to hold back when you have so many great things that you want to share with clients, but rather than over cluttered ads, utilize the different mediums available for advertising today: print, online ads, tv, and social media. In fact using different (but similar) promotions on different mediums might help you discover if the location of advertising is working the way you want it to. This also allows for greater saturation in the market.

This is a good lesson year-round, not just during the holidays. 

Blank Page

I love looking at a blank page—knowing its potential and the fresh start that it provides every time I pull out a new sheet. I am known for having a piles of "used" paper cluttering my desktop. I tend to keep paper around until I have used both sides of the paper to its fullest potential.

Whether it is a sketch, painting, doodle, or just a lengthy list; the process of filling a blank page is cathartic and stimulates my brain. I can more quickly see a solution and new ideas in the few minutes it takes me to fill a page, and that is refreshing.

So FILL a page today.

Back to Basics

With all the jazz we sometimes ad to our designs, such as graphics, textures, layers, effects, and multiple type treatments it can be refreshing to get back to basics.

http://lovelypackage.com/brand/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKho1aDikBI

These packaging examples prove that simple and elegant type along with simple color fields can make simple look expensive and intriguing. One typeface: Helvetica, it is always a safe bet using Helvetica because it is simple clean and never fussy. Helvetica also gives you many styles and weights to choose from. I also goes to show generic does not need to look cheap.

As I mentioned in Getting the Right Kind of Attention http://designmorsel.blogspot.com/2011/06/getting-right-kind-of-attention.html

It may seem easy, but have a simple and unfussy design can be the more difficult to accomplish. I encourage anyone who is reading this to take a look at your work this week and remove the excess and leave the essentials to a design. Using simple black and white can be elegant and save your client money. Giving yourself a challenge is a great way to bounce off new ideas that would not happen in the same way if you did not give yourself any restrictions.

A recent birthday card I made from my brother. Really simple just black and white. He has that modern aesthetic so this really fit him for me. I could be a little more fun with the interior of the envelope for a surprise punch of color. This was my attempt at going back to basics could clean type. Maybe a little boring with Helvetica, but it is always a classic choice.