Speaker 1: Today, learn 6 insider tips on how to improve your graphic designs instantly in just a few clicks. The knowledge in today's video is going to prove to be valuable to your career and I'm going to share you examples along the way. It's great being able to show people how a design looks, but even more impressive if they can actually experience it too and this leads to them understanding how it's going to behave. And so learn more about Framer later in today's video and how to show off your designs. There are many, many different ways to improve or structure your graphic designs. So the things that you're going to see in today's video are not the entire checklist so to speak, but they are hugely important aspects to understand. So firstly, we're going to talk about something in relation to colour. Now colour is the life force of graphic design and it's one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. And the first tip is one easy thing to remember. Before you start designing anything, think about the vibe or the message that you want to express in the design. So let's take the example of a poster or an advert that is trying to sell or promote a natural food product. The message you might want to communicate is that the product is made from natural ingredients and it's also healthy. So with those things in mind and those keywords, what kind of colour scheme can you come up with? You might think of colours that are kind of earth tones as these are natural. And also green colours suggest health in a subconscious kind of way. Also you might include white or white space because that resembles cleanliness which is closely linked to health. So before you start any work on your designs, do consider the vibe or the message and then choose your colours accordingly. And remember that Illustrator has a built-in colour scheme library that you can choose and browse and explore different colour schemes. The next tip is a quick way to trigger your audience and to make them happy in a subconscious kind of way. It can also lead the viewer to information. Now we're going to use colour once again for this one and let's stick with the healthy food product design. So it's also a great idea to apply colour to text or different elements on your design by sampling colour from the design in general. So for example we can sample a green or a brown from the imagery and then apply that colour to the text. This actually links different elements in your design together and it provides the viewer with some consistency and this is a great tip to remember that literally just takes a few seconds. So context is really crucial when designing something for a client. Context helps you deliver the message more efficiently and adds an extra depth to the design. So for example let's take a look at this landing page design I've made here. If the landing page is talking about cryptocurrency or bitcoin, having a relevant image or an icon that links back to that textual content is highly efficient and it's going to elevate your designs to the next level. So you can see the before image where I don't have the icon, things don't look nearly as professional as when I add it in. You do want to try and add some context that the viewer can instantly understand and relate back to the message of the design and one quick way to do that is with an icon or an image. So the next tip in today's video is one that I use in all of my designs pretty much and again it is quick and easy to do and the tip here is to use some contrasting font pairs. So this basically means just finding two different fonts that contrast each other in a neat and visually appealing way. You can do this by choosing a serif font and a sans serif font or maybe a bold and a thin font as a different example or you could even just use colour to highlight the contrast. But one foolproof method is to find a typeface with many different font weights and then you can just choose a bold and a thin version of that typeface. And as you can see on screen here we have Elrond which is one of my favourite typefaces. This is going to add some interest to your graphic designs and as we've spoken about before in this channel it is a form of hierarchy and that is something you're probably going to see in every different piece of graphic design you come across. Tip number five is something again really really easy to do yet so many designers don't even consider it. Everything needs a beginning and your design should have a starting point where the viewer can look and be drawn into the graphics themselves. So why not make a focal point aka a point of interest? So how do we actually make a focal point? You can always use an element of your design that is larger and ungrouped essentially just residing by itself in one area of the graphic design. This can be an image, a word or even a single letter. You can also use a colour to generate a focal point so that one element is obviously a different colour from the rest of your design. Your focal point does not need to be intensely obvious but it is always a great idea to consider what kind of starting point you want your viewer to begin when looking at the design. You do want to make those kind of visual hooks so to speak. And as you can see a lot of the points in today's video are actually based around thinking about things before you start designing and that is something you should be doing in your graphic design projects. You should be planning and evaluating your steps before you even get on the computer or pick up a pencil. Interactive prototyping is the best way to communicate your app and your website designs. The sponsor of today's video, Framer, is a no-code, free-to-use tool making it easy for anyone to become a prototyper so you can import your existing work and quickly swap out your static elements for pre-built interactive components. This includes things like sliders that actually do slide and inputs that can be filled as well as buttons that can actually be clicked. Building out a full user flow is super simple as well. You can just link screens, buttons and menu items and pretty soon you will have a prototype that clearly communicates your vision to whoever you want to show it to. Now sign up for free by visiting framer.com forward slash Satori. That link is down in the description box below so do give it a try if you are a web or app developer. If you want to learn some more really useful tips about graphic design, do click a video on screen. And until next time guys, design your future today. Peace. www.framer.com