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This might be too subjective but I'm curious about other peoples' experiences. Mods, please close if this is too far into "not a real question" territory.
I see many questions on this site about "what are good resources?" and "where do I learn?", but what are common mistakes that designers make?
Ie., if you're on the train and you see a poster ad on the wall, how often do you think "wow, I can't believe they did that!"? Are there certain mistakes that are more commonplace than others?
This is a real question, and it's a good one. It's also one that has entire books devoted to it! (One that I highly recommend, even to design school grads, is Robin Williams' "The Non-Designer's Design Book." It beautifully defines and demonstrates the biggest and commonest design errors.) Let's narrow it to technique errors, because I think that's what you're really asking about. And to keep it simple, let's confine this mostly to print (since you mention posters).
Here are a few that I see far too often:
Not reading and understanding the publishing specs for a printed piece: Magazines, billboard companies, printers' prepress departments all have exact specs for size, resolution, color space, bleed, etc. I don't know any publisher or printer who doesn't list this as their number one complaint about the artwork they receive. If the artwork comes in wrong, then it has to be corrected before it can be used (or, worse, they let it go through and it comes out too dark, too light, with bad color or worst of all distorted to fit). Corrections add time and expense; errors passed through result in unhappy clients who won't come back. Always read the spec carefully and talk to the prepress department before starting the design.
Not allowing for folds: It's too easy to forget that paper has thickness. When a piece is folded multiple times, or a booklet is folded and stitched, things won't fit, or will be in the wrong place if the design didn't allow for that. Again, talk to the printer before you start.
Lousy kerning: Headlines that are badly kerned have one tenth the impact of properly typeset headlines. Don't take your font's/software's defaults. It will be wrong 90% of the time in at least one or two letter pairs.
Typos: Things like extra spaces, misspelled words (or worse, names), wrong dates/times. It's amazing how often these will slip by if you don't proofread carefully.
Not lining things up: This one separates the amateurs from the real designers every time. Exact alignment looks "right" and has impact. A headline and subhead that almost align on the left edge look awful. The client might not identify this as a problem, but they will know something is subtly wrong.
Typewriter habits: Things like using spaces, instead of tabs or your layout program's indent settings, to indent text, two spaces after punctuation instead of one, extra blank lines between paragraphs, all scream "amateur" and look bad.
Not being consistent: In any publication longer than one page (and even then), designers who don't work with style sheets introduce little inconsistencies of spacing, leading, point size, color or shading. Every paragraph, heading, subhead, callout, sidebar or illustration of a particular type should be the same as every other one of that type in a publication. Style sheets (Paragraph, Character and Object styles) not only keep things consistent, they allow any style changes to be reflected throughout the document without error. It astonishes me how many designers don't use them.
There's lots of type details that, if forgotten, stick out to me:
In web design, what bothers me is a lack of detail given to the medium:
I do mostly web work, although this can be related to magazine work too:
Things that irk me:
But... design is not (only) about rules. If it feels good for you, go with it. Remember: if you put 2 dots randomly on a page it can be considered design.
Using Photoshop for everything, while not fully understanding print resolution issues, resulting in pixelated text.
Looking at a print design, that is supposed to be held in hands (real hands, with fingers and such), on a screen and think there's enough margin! Just look at the blank artboard around the document in InDesign ... or the gray area in Adobe Reader — there's vast amount of white space!
I can't even count how many times I've been holding a book in my hands and thinking: how am I supposed to hold this design comfortably, while not blocking any text with my fingers (which are, after all, designer–fingers, not lumberjack–fingers)?
Different designers do different mistakes.
Well the rest has been pretty much beat down.
I would share a layman's perspective on this topic. Please note it is not completely in context to Graphics design but still has an impact on overall design. These are few common blunders that I had noticed:
Improper choice of shade of word, it really has a huge impact.
Bad color combination.Bad in sense when compared to the theme of the Ad.
For example,
Ads with children as focus can have loud colors, but for some scheme of bank you can't really use pink and magenta or any loud color,its got to be sober.
Awesome Blog- Differentiates Ads which are deliberately ungrammatical from those with common grammatical blunders.
