Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips

New location for Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips

Thank you for visiting Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips blog.

I have consolidated all of my graphic design, marketing, and writing articles, resources, and tips into my Published & Profitable blog.

At my Published & Proifitable blog, where you'll find over 1,000 posts about content marketing, print and online graphic design ideas, latest trends in design, and information about upcoming events.

You may also enjoy visiting Design To Sell Online. Although I'm not currently updating the site, it contains a graphic design blog and chapter downloads from my recent Design to Sell book.

Best wishes on your graphic design explorations!

Roger C. Parker

 

Learn the 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design

Guerrilla Marketing, a name coined by Jay Conrad Levinson over twenty-five years ago, is a marketing philosophy based on efficiency and results.

Guerrilla Marketing puts a premium on obtaining big results from small budgets, eliminating the ego and creative excesses characteristic of so much graphic design.

Download my free special report, The 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design, and learn how a marketing  philosophy of results and restraint can revitalize the way you deliver your messages.

Subhead formatting no-no's to avoid

Subheads are not sentences.

Therefore, they should not end with periods!

Periods after subheads add a subtle amount of clutter to the page. Periods also create barriers that discourage readers from reading on.

My Marketing Your Business with a One-Page Newsletter contains more formatting tips as does my Newsletter Marketing blog.

Three tips for more effective subheads

Here are some tips for increasing the communicating power of subheads. Subheads are short phrases that preview the next topic in a newsletter article, proposal, or on your website.

Subheads play a major role in making your message more attractive and easier to understand by "advertising" the text that follows, converting skimmers into readers.

1. Keep subheads short. Restrict subheads to just keywords. Never use full sentences. Subheads are like highway billboards; they should communicate at a glance. Subheads should never occupy more than one line!
2. Use white space purposefully. Avoid subheads that "float" between paragraphs. There should be more white space above the subhead, separating it from the previous paragraph, than between the subhead and the paragraph it introduces.
3. Put typeface contrast to work. Subheads should be set in a contrasting typeface, type size, and type style, than adjacent text. If you are using a serif typeface for body copy, use a larger and bolder sans serif typeface for subheads.

Adding white space makes text columns look easier to read

There are three ways you can easily make an obvious improvement in the appearance of print publications like newsletters and proposals:

• Add white space between the top of each column and the header of each page (which can consist of text, a horizontal line, or both)
• Add white space between the bottom of each column and the footer of each page
• Add white space in both locations

Simply replacing two or three lines of type on each page with extra white space can go a long way towards opening-up the appearance of your pages. Just be sure you add the same amount of white space to each page.

Avoid text wraps

Text wraps occur when lines of type are shortened, because a photograph is placed within text columns or a portion of a photograph breaks into an adjacent column.

Text wraps are bad because:

1. Interruption. Text wraps interfere with your reader's steady left-to-right eye movements based on lines of equal length. When line length is reduced, readers have to re-adjust the rate at which their eyes scan each line.
2. Hyphenation and word spacing. Text wraps increase hyphenation and--in justified text  (i.e., lines of equal length)--they create awkward changes in word spacing. Lines with just a few long words will have very wide word spacing; lines with several short words will have very tight word spacing. This is not only visually distracting, but slows readers down.

To avoid text wraps, try aligning the edges of photographs with the underlying column grid and resizing photographs to the full width of text columns.

Always search for extra spaces

One of the easiest ways to improve your designs is to do Search and Replace after you've finished editing your project.

Instruct your software to Search (or Find) for every instance of two spaces in a row, and Replace themwith a single space.

If you've done extensive editing, you may be surprised to find how much extra space has snuck into your text. This extra space can be especially noticeable if you are setting justified text--lines of equal length.