6 common graphic design mistakes – are you making these errors?

Designing for success often means following some form of structure or rule. If you’re a startup working on your own designs, it’s likely that you don’t know about them. You’ll be going off of visuals alone.

So here are some mistakes to avoid, which you can turn into your own set of rules to follow if you can’t get a professional designer to work with you just yet.

Or if you are planning to work with a graphic designer or a marketing agency, this might help you to understand why your designs are the way they are. 

1. Ignoring the Target Audience

Number 1 worst mistake you can make. We’re starting at the top here. There’s no waiting until the end here. Ignore your target audience and you might as well say goodbye to your business now. 

You might notice a trend here if you’ve read past blog posts. But the Target Audience is the most important. Your company isn’t for you. It’s not for your friend, not for your mum, not for your neighbour. Though that doesn’t mean they don’t fall into your target audience, they might. You might find you’re building a company with baby toys, and your friend might be a good person to ask if she has babies and purchases baby toys regularly, but your other friend who doesn’t have children and only spends their money out at pubs and restaurants is not a great person to ask. However they might be good to ask if you’re opening a restaurant.

Avoid focusing on pleasing singular people. Avoid focusing on pleasing everyone. You’ll never please everyone, there will always be someone who will have something to say. That doesn’t mean you need to give up. You need to look at the whole group, find what’s the most optimal way to reach as many people as possible. Some people will focus on pleasing everyone, but there will be individuals who are different. There always will be. But focus on most, and don’t worry about individuals so much.

We’ll often find that our start-up clients will receive a design from us, and then mention that their wife or husband doesn’t like it and thinks we should change everything. We all focus on ourselves or the important people in our lives, what makes us or them happy. But that doesn’t always translate well to business.

For example, not naming any names here, we’re not calling anyone out. But a few years ago we had a lady come to us asking for branding for her husband’s company – he’s a builder and had a few employees, and she wanted to surprise him.  We created some designs for her, but she was adamant to make flowers the main part of the logo. 

The name didn’t have anything to do with flowers. She didn’t give us any back story as to why maybe a certain flower was important to her husband. She just wanted the logo to be girly and flowery. Not only does this not follow the target audience of her husband’s company, but it didn’t even match what he did. 

If there’s something as specific as this example that you want to execute because it’s perhaps original. Make sure you have a story or reasoning behind it – and make it known to your audience. Maybe you’ll find that you own a building company that mostly employs women and has a feminine touch to the work you provide, and you’re looking to advertise to other women. Your story of your company and your target audience can and will link together. If your branding is feminine it will attract a larger female audience. In this case, you won’t want your company to be full of men who might leave everything messy or generally just have a rougher hand (sorry, just stereotyping here for an easy example). Having all men in a woman’s house for example could also make them uneasy, and having branding that suggested a feminine company might end up coming across to some as false advertising, which eventually could cause you to not receive the positive feedback that you hoped for. 

In short, summarise who you and your company are. Who you want to attract. Who you want to work with. Who you will work well with. Create a design that will encapsulate all of this.

2. Overcomplicating the Design

My most ‘favourite’… feedback to receive is “there’s too much blank/white space”.

Let the design BREATHE! Whatever it is, a logo, a leaflet, a website, I assure you, you don’t need as much ‘design’ or text as you think it does.

Using a simple quick example, using 3 very different designs, (not that I’d call that first one a design). Design 1 uses large fonts, and sure that has its advantages, however, had I used real text, you wouldn’t be able to name one thing quickly off the design. There’s nothing indicating what it is. Nothing stands out. The text reaches to the very edges of the design, and is just one solid wall of text. Even if I was reading a book (which personally I do a lot of) if I saw a book without margins I would close the book immediately. Our eyes need to breathe too. The breathing space allows our eyes to focus on specific things, without getting distracted.

In this example, I used the same font and font size, no bold text. The name ‘SLT Media’ is in the same exact location on both A and B. But you will find it’s a lot easier to find the name on the first one. Because the breathing room allows you to focus in on it without getting distracted by the words around it. There’s no fancy arrows or bold text pointing to it. It simply uses the space to draw attention. You don’t look at that space and think ‘oh what wasted space’. You just focus on what’s inside.

Going back to the original 1-3 designs, the 2nd is very plain compared to the third and you might find the 3rd design catches your eye more than the second. This is where your target audience and goal comes into play. The 3rd design is overcomplicated in the sense that you’re drawn to the big bold shapes, but you’re not drawn to the text. You’d find that this kind of design is best for less information. For example, if you’re selling something visual like clothes for example, you want more photos, but you also want less text. How many times have you seen a Nike or Adidas leaflet with their whole company story printed? If I were looking at the 3rd design I would only read the title and the bold sentence in the bottom corner. I wouldn’t read the middle text. However with the 2nd design. The focus is solely on the information. The title is big enough to grab my attention (and had this been a real design with real text, I would hope that the text was interesting enough to keep me reading). There’s nothing around the design that’s too overwhelming for me to focus on the big middle section. In this case, if the real design had this much text, I would focus on creating the design closer to the 2nd example, with so much information, you don’t want to overwhelm, and over complicate. The 2nd design is good for a company that maybe deals with legal things, and might have to have a lot of information. 

But again it all links back to your Target Audience, it always does and it always will. 

3. Poor Use of Typography

This also links very much into what I spoke about in my previous point. So take this on top of what I mentioned above.

Everything about your visual brand is secretly typography. No one really looks at it that way. At least I haven’t seen anyone talk about it this way. But your brand is essentially your typography. If it’s bad, your company looks unprofessional. No matter how good your logo, colours, or photos are. If your typography is lacking. Everything is lacking. There’s more fonts and typefaces out there than I can count. A good tip however is to use a font that is web compatible. A good free one I like to use is Google Fonts. Easy to install, and that way you can keep your brand consistent by using it on your social media, prints, and your website. If you’re using Adobe Products, I also love using Adobe Fonts. It’s a little trickier to use this one when it comes to adding it to your website, but it makes your choice of typeface a little more unique. 

I edited a current design we use to show an example of how important typography and typefaces are. The first one uses all the same fonts, just in different thicknesses and sizes to allow some things to take more focus over others. It has a priority hierarchy and it’s clear and easy to read. Certain things are highlighted using a bold font to help you remember key information.

The second design however uses all random fonts. I have used 5 different fonts. None of which match. They are not picked correctly for the concept. The heading is too thin and gets lost within the background. The handwritten font for the bulletpoints has made the text impossible to read. And again the bottom sentence has become one fluid line of shapes. The text inside the green circles doesn’t match the style of the design at all. 

So you can see that a design can be good, the photos, the colours, etc. But if your typography is lacking, the whole design becomes bad. 

4. Neglecting Brand Consistency

Surprise surprise all these points link to each other. 

Neglecting brand consistency is such a common mistake we see. Start ups will use Canva templates, and instead of sticking to one, every new social media post is made on a different template. I understand the logic. They want every post to not be the same and identical. But when every post has a different font, a different logo, different colours. There is no chance someone who sees one post is going to link you together when they see a second. They might even see one post one day, and then remember they needed to contact you, they’ll go searching for you only to find a whole different visual brand and they’ll continue looking thinking they’re in the wrong place because the post they saw was modern, with green and white colours, but the most recent post is red and black and very traditional. Help your customers remember you by keeping your visual brand consistent. 

Another example of why neglecting your brand consistency is bad – have you ever seen a brand that was hacked? Suddenly all their posts don’t look the same? Their fonts might be similar but it’s quite obvious that it’s not them anymore? That their content has gone from showing their new finished projects to suddenly selling clothing? I definitely have. A lot of people definitely have. And in some sense seeing that has conditioned us into seeing that changes like that don’t mean anything good. Changes like that peak our flight response. ‘Get away, unfollow, block, don’t get scammed.’ So now having an inconsistent brand, subconsciously triggers this response too. It causes us to be weary and not trust that brand. So it’s so important in the current day to keep your brand consistent.

5. Ignoring Mobile Responsiveness

It’s 2025, don’t…

Okay, but seriously. We see this all the time too. Startups don’t always have the budget for a website, and will use free online templates. More often than not they won’t be responsive. 

Responsive website in simple terms means a website that will adapt to the monitor it’s opened on. For example a mobile website wont open on your desktop pc, and a desktop website wont open on your mobile. You can imagine if that happened you wouldn’t be able to either read anything, or use it very well.

The free templates do sometimes have responsive designs, I’ll give them that. But they have limits. If for example you use a template, but decide actually having a photo in a certain section doesn’t work for you, and you move it – it can actually cause the whole website to break. Websites need structure, especially if they’re responsive. If you move one thing, it’s like a jenga block, it could all very easily topple over. 

If you want to reach more people, keep more people, and keep your current people happy, ensure that your website can be viewed correctly on any device. 

6. Using Low-quality Images & Graphics

This is last on the list for a reason. It’s not as important as the rest, but it does still make an impact, which is why it is still on the list. 

If you want your company to look professional, if you want your visual brand to have great photos to use, invest in a photography course. We live in a time where everyone has amazing cameras in their pockets. If you have a mobile phone, you have a camera. And I can’t stress this enough; USE IT! People prefer to see your products or finished projects over stock photos, or worse, stolen low quality images from other people or google. 

Invest time in taking photos. I’m saying invest, because we have heard too often ‘we don’t have time to take photos’ but it’s the best investment you can make. There are online courses you can take that can help and they’re not longer than a few hours. And who doesn’t want to add a skill to their collection? If you genuinely don’t have the time, then you have the money to hire a photographer. I said what I said.

Whatever you do though. Do. Not. Steal. Other. Peoples. Images. Or. Graphics.

In summary / TL:DR

A short list of rules to follow:

1. Your target audience is your number one priority.
2. Keep it simple. Less is more.
3. Your typography is what people see first. Make sure it’s good. (Your brand is what they notice first. Your typography is how they see the information you give.)
4. Stay consistent with your brand identity. Fonts, colours, images, logos.
5. Make sure your website is responsive.
6. Take good quality photos of your products or projects. (Don’t take all photos vertically, have a good mix of both horizontal and vertical.)

If this is all too much for you, we are more than happy to help and take some of your workload off your shoulders. Over the last 15 years we have made every mistake and learned from fixing them. Let us save you 15 years worth of mistakes.

Even if you made it to the end of this blog, you have saved yourself many years of mistakes, so good job! It’s hard to want to learn how to fix your mistakes, we as humans insist on never being wrong. If you can admit you make mistakes, and take steps to learn from them, you have a higher chance of success.