Graphic design plays an important role in communicating and understanding graphic information. Good graphic design can enhance clarity, increase engagement, and portray professionalism.
Bad graphic design, on the other hand, can lead to misinformation, low user engagement, and a general negative impression. This guide will analyze and explain good and bad graphic design examples, highlighting their characteristics and key elements.
Layout can be the difference between the success or failure of a brand, professional, or organization’s intended communication. This can in turn affect your overall conversions.
Detecting good or bad design requires an understanding of the basic aspects of design and how they are used together in harmony with each other to pass a specific message.
Graphic design is an art where the creative use of photography, typography, and illustration is applied to communicate a message. Every graphic designer is tasked with making good designs that communicate. Sometimes one may follow all the instructions of a client but still miss the tone of voice or overdo the designs.
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Bad graphic design examples?
Bad graphic designs are easier to detect than you may think. Bad graphic design fails to communicate effectively with the targeted users.
For example, in a poorly designed flier, users will find it hard to find the most important information, such as dates, venue, and many more. This information can be altogether missing in some poster or flier designs.
Another example is a cluttered landing page design. A cluttered page will not attract attention or users, leading to low interest and clicks. It fails to prioritize a specific audience or message and ignores attractiveness or proper use of design elements to pass a message. Worst of all, it fails to identify and represent who is passing the message, why, and to whom.
Poorly designed elements portray a lack of professionalism or care from an organization, which can result in a negative impression from users.
Cluttered Layout
A cluttered design is overloaded with texts, images, or graphic elements. It will overwhelm the user and make important information difficult to find and understand.
The most important thing in design is communicating your message and placing different elements, such as photos and text, on a design. Not balancing your elements in your artwork or ad makes your design look bad.
For instance, on a newspaper layout, the headline needs to be in bold font and centrally placed to capture the readers’ attention. If the headline and subheading are wrongly placed, the important message is disoriented.
You can consider using only the most relevant elements in your design to avoid clustering. You can also leave more white space on your design or reduce the overall size of elements on your design. Arrange your elements in an easy-to-read way to avoid disorganization and information cluttering.
Poor Typography
Poor typography will not be consistent, making the design look unprofessional and chaotic. This will reduce readability and attractiveness. Avoid difficult-to-read font types and styles by using fonts relevant to the topic. For example, the Luckiest Guy font is perfect for kids’ designs.
Avoid using many different font types in one document. If you do, maintain a clear font hierarchy for easy communication. There are so many fonts on the web that one can easily download online, but not all of them are good.
Many bad typefaces out there are just ugly, illegible, and boring to use on creative designs. Examples include Copperplate Gothic combined with Trajan Pro, Comic Sans, Papyrus, and Courier and Curls.
Inconsistent Colors
Poor use of color can hinder a design’s effectiveness. Clashing colors that fail to complement each other will affect the effectiveness of the design. Additionally, make sure background colors contrast well with text and do not make the text hard to read.
Inconsistent colors will cause distractions away from the intended message and visual strain for the viewers. Poor color choices will also be unattractive.
Color in design is very subjective. It evokes different reactions in different people, and sometimes it might be perceived negatively due to the color combination.
Understanding how color affects people is very important in graphic design. Putting hues on top of one another would be common sense for most designers, but it still happens. Some color combinations make your design look bad, and most people would just ignore your art.
For example, green on red. Combining these two shades of color makes it hard to read, and the color clashing makes the viewer’s eyes react negatively to what it sees. Purple on green evokes the same reaction as green on red.
Low-Quality Images
Low-resolution or pixelated images will not be ideal for good graphic design. Furthermore, poorly cropped images will result in an overall unprofessional feel to the design. These aspects communicate the impression of low or poor attention to detail, reducing the overall quality and attractiveness of the design.
Lack of Visual Hierarchy
Poor design fails to highlight important information like date, time, and location. Clear hierarchy and information flow guide the viewer towards the most relevant and important information. Without this, it is hard for the audience to identify important details quickly, and it reduces effectiveness.
Bad grammar
When it comes to visual and print media, grammatical errors stand out like a sore thumb, making your design look bad. Wrong grammar can kill a design and shift the attention of the viewer, sending the wrong message, mostly if it is print media, either individual, company, or public design. The wrong grammar can cost the brand a lot of money and the company’s credibility to the public viewer.
For example, Rachael finds inspiration in cooking for her family and her dog. In the example above, the design gives the message a different meaning than the intended one.
Misaligned Elements
Text, shapes, images, and other graphic elements are placed wrongly, resulting in a disorganized look. Misaligned elements make designs look unprofessional and rushed and can affect credibility and attractiveness.
Good graphic design examples?
Good design refers to an attractive and aesthetically pleasing item that is both functional and a clear representative of a sponsor or brand behind a message.
It balances being attractive and appealing with the delicate function of passing a message to a specific intended audience in the easiest and most user-friendly way possible.
Graphic designers interact with software and design elements such as photos, shapes, fonts, color, size variation, and textures to create good and effective communication items.
When you think of graphic design, your mind goes to the eye-catching advertisements on the web and beautiful spreads in magazines, but the design is broader and also includes posters, infographics, book covers, product labels, logos, business cards, and therefore the list goes on and on.
In making graphic designs, there are rules, and those rules are called principles of design.
They typically separate good design from bad design. And in this article, we are going to look at how these principles make for a good design.
Balance
The visual weight of every element is distributed in a way that gives the composition stability. We use balance to add stability, structure, emphasis, and dynamics.
In design, you will attempt to place visual elements in a pleasing arrangement to satisfy a purpose or achieve a particular look and feel.
Every good design considers the type of balance to achieve, whether symmetrical, asymmetrical, or radial balance.
Understanding these three sorts of balance will help achieve the proper visual effect in your graphic design.
For instance, when you draw a line at the center of an image and the visual elements on one side of the screen are mirrored on the other side. They don’t have to be identical but can be similar in number, shape, or scale.
Contrast
Contrast is used heavily in graphic design, and it is when two visual elements are dramatically different. The greater the difference, the greater the contrast, and therefore the key to working with contrast and graphic design is ensuring that differences are obvious to the viewer.
The contrast in size, value, and, of course, some other elements too. The main reasons for using contrast in graphic design are for emphasis, highlighting information, and creating a hook.
For example, size is an easy way to create contrasts; placing two elements next to each other that are similar in every aspect apart from their size is one way to bring size contrast to the table of your design. It can be a big and a small image or a big image in a small typeface, but leaving plenty of white space around a small object is another way to create contrast.
Movement
This is the trail the viewer’s eye takes through the artwork, often to areas of focus. So a lot of time movement can be directed along lines or edges.
A good design will have visual pathways to guide the viewer’s attention from one form to another. Example: When we look at a stairwell design, we can see these sorts of lines of the stairwell kind of moving in a spiral fashion, and the lines pulling us from the edges of the piece all towards the center of the stairwell.
Repetition
This is reusing equivalent or similar elements throughout a design. Good design practice seeks to repeat some aspects of design throughout a bit of work, be it for an easier or more complex piece of labor.
We use repetition to bring a sense of unity and consistency throughout a design. Repetition creates a specific style, artistic cohesiveness, and emphasis and also strengthens your design.
The ultimate goal of any design is to make a good, lasting impression. Repetition in design is a type of visual brainwashing. The more we see something, the more we familiarize ourselves with it, thus committing it to memory. It is human nature to find comfort and attraction in familiarity.
A good example of repetition is in branding. In any good brand, there will be consistent use of style and language, such as a particular color scheme, typeface, or photography style.
Good Graphic Design
Presentation—Communicates the message or intended goal in an easy-to-go-through and understand kind of way.
Functionality—Targeted to serve a specific purpose and solve a problem. Tries to meet the needs of an audience in the best way.
Visual Appeal—Should be visually appealing with elements, appropriate use of colors, typography, and imagery. Well used to attract attention and direct it to relevant and most important areas.
Communication Aesthetic: Gives a clear communication of the intended message or goal, whether selling a product, informing, entertaining, or even educating.
Brand Identity or Sponsor: Tries to match the sponsor’s branding and brand consistency. This results in trust and brand reinforcement. It also identifies the organization or person communicating.
Creativity: Create exciting and unique designs that attract your audience better than your competition and pass a message.
User Experience: Invests in creating a design that a reader enjoys and interacts with enjoyably. Easy and user-friendly designs.
Bad Graphic Design
Presentation—Usually overloads the reader with too much unnecessary information that is hard to comprehend.
Functionality—It has no clear purpose, or the purpose is lost in the information and can be difficult to understand or use.
Visual Appeal—Not visually appealing or attractive, with poor color choices, cluttered layouts, inconsistent fonts, and low-quality imagery. Most things are not well planned to direct attention.
Communication Aesthetic: Lack of a clear communication value with no clear intended message or goal. It fails to connect with or attract its audience.
Brand Identity or Sponsor: Ignores the sponsor’s branding and brand consistency. This results in mistrust or overall failure to identify the organization or person communicating.
Creativity: Usually generic designs or elements that are both overused and sometimes monotonous. It sometimes erodes the overall message.
User Experience: Bad design that is difficult to navigate and understand. Readers find it difficult to make out what the design is about.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Good Design?
Good design refers to an attractive and aesthetically pleasing item that is both functional and a clear representative of the sponsor or brand behind a message.
It balances being attractive and appealing with the delicate function of passing a message to a specific intended audience in the easiest and most user-friendly way possible.What is bad graphic design?
Now that you know what good design is, bad graphic design is easier to detect. Bad graphic design is the opposite. It fails to prioritize a specific audience or message and ignores attractiveness or proper use of design elements to pass a message.
Worst of all, it fails to identify and represent who is passing the message, why, and to whom.