Design Time: Steer Away from These Five Marketing Design No-No’s

Design is the aesthetic side of marketing which is intended to give your audience an enjoyable, pleasing, artistic experience while they consume your marketing text. It is meant to enhance your copy and drive home the points you’re trying to make – that your readers need help, specifically your help.

Bearing that in mind, there are certain aspects of marketing design you should use, and things you . . . well, you should sooner attempt to beat out a fire with a sack of kittens than make these marketing mistakes on your website. Let’s take a look at a few.   

Overexaggerated or Unrealistic Images

While cartoons are fun, they’re not real life. Potential customers are seeking to relate to you and your offerings, so they need to see real world applications to which they can relate. You want them to see an image and be reminded of something familiar which applies to them, or to want their life to reflect what’s in the imagery. Unless you’re writing a piece about a failed attempt by Wile E. Coyote to catch the Road Runner, keep it real.

Widows/Orphans

If you don’t know what a widow is – in the literary world, at least – it’s simply ending a paragraph with a solitary word on the last line. It’s also called an orphan. It doesn’t seem terribly egregious, but sharp eyes will always be drawn to them, and it appears sloppy and unprofessional.

Seriously, how does this
look?

Clashing Colors

Right off the bat, I – as a website reader – want to grab the nearest object over 10 pounds and hurl it violently into the screen, just from looking at the accompanying image. Always avoid color combinations which incite violence in your readers. By the way, this is a colorblind person’s nightmare. Your copywriters worked hard on the incredible content for the website. The least you can do for them is not make their readers want to turn off their monitors because of your unfortunate color selection.

Low-Resolution Images

Why do people wear glasses or contacts? They do so because it’s important to them in their daily lives to see things more sharply and clearly. Why, then, would you use an image on your website which NO ONE could EVER see sharply or clearly, even if they had super-Kryptonian vision?! Some people blow off the importance of higher resolution photos, saying, “Eh, I couldn’t find anything higher res, so this will have to do.” Wrong. There exist exactly 42.9 bazillion high-resolution images on the Internet, at least ONE of which will suit your purposes. The option to utilize a low-resolution image should be punishable by public caning.

. . . and the Mother of All Marketing Design Blunders: COMIC SANS

There are two justifiable reasons to use the Comic Sans font:

     1. You are a Kindergarten teacher making signs for your classroom.

     2. Every other font on the face of the planet has mysteriously vanished from all computers.

Otherwise, you are highly advised to avoid, avoid, AVOID the Comic Sans font. It is the definition – the very epitome – of unprofessionalism. Want to start the zombie apocalypse? Use the clashing color scheme mentioned above with Comic Sans. People will lose their fricking minds to such a degree, it will put George A. Romero to shame. (–and shame on you if you had to click the link to find out who he was.)

Let TRIdigital Be Your Marketing Design Guide

Our people have collectively been in this business for a long time. We know what types of images and layouts people will enjoy viewing, and the types which will trigger a Hulk Rage-esque reaction. Take a look at a few examples of our work, and if you’d like your website to look as nice as these, let’s talk.