A small but valuable visual design trick

As a senior designer, I often find myself using the same minor tricks repeatedly to make my designs look better. And it always works.

I haven’t seen these tips anywhere else, so I’m sure they’ll be new and helpful for you.

The best way to demonstrate stuff is always by example.

We’ll start with a boring design for a Keynote slide (something we all have to design regularly), and we’ll improve it step by step.

An ugly front page for a boring powerpoint presentation.

The image below represents a design I see quite often. A boring title in the middle, with a subtitle below. Aesthetically there is nothing wrong with it, but it’s not too exciting and it feels like it could use a little love.

Let’s briefly go over what we’re seeing first before we apply improvements.

A wise designer once told me to always analyze the situation first before changing any pixels.

We’re seeing a subtitle that is, considering it’s content, not important enough to be this big. Are the names and the date really that important?
A title that’s quite large but has gotten no love for kerning or lineheight.
A logo in the top left. It could be in the center, but it’s nice to have the logo in the same position on all slides and therefore we put it in the top left.

Improvement #1: a little contrast and a more interesting placement of elements.

To align the title with the logo, we could position the title on the left. Don’t hesitate to place it all the way to the left—there’s enough whitespace between the elements, so extra space on the outer margins isn’t needed.

A good design doens’t need symmetry per sé, a little contrast creates tension, and tensions make a design more interesting to look at.

If we would have placed the date and the namers on the left as well, there would be too much a-symmetry. The word ‘little’ before ‘contrast’ in the previous sentence is therefor important 😉

Let’s go over the changes we made so far:

We’ve aligned the title on the left, aligning it with the logo.
We’ve placed all the details in a smaller font in the corners of your page, creating more focus on the title.
We’ve outbalanced the designs: making it less dull and more interesting to look at.

We can make it look even better though.

A few final tweaks for slides that make your audience pay attention

Even though the previous design was more interesting compared to what we started with: it’s still a little dull.

Let’s analyze and ask ourselves some questions:

Could we add more contrast to controll what the audience is looking at?
Could more tension (by making the big bigger, and the small smaller) make the design more interesting?
Can we do something with the placement of elements? Such as the ‘rule of thirds’ or ‘the golden ratio’ help with the aesthetics of the design?

Above the final result. What did we change?

We’ve considered the importance of the details. They contained dates and authors, which is not important to be that big, so we’ve reduced the font size even more. It’s big enough to read after you receive a presentation, but not too big that people start reading it while you’re talking or presenting
The title is even larger than before. This adds even more tension by increasing the contrast between large and small font sizes: creating an even more interesting design.
And perhaps the most important thing: kerning/letter-spacing is reduced. Most typefaces need manual adjustments when enlarged. There are a few typefaces that have a “headline” variant which accounts for increased font size, but most typefaces don’t. With large font-size you should drastically reduce the letter-spacing, and do some manual kerning if you like.

Final words

I hope these tips and tricks are going to be very useful for you. If you think about it, you’re going to need this all day. Whether it’s in webdesign, social posts or a presentation you’re designing, you’re playing with contrast, size, composition and typography all the time.

So next time you’re creating a seemingly boring slide or social post, play around with contrast, tension, (un)balance & a-symmetry to create a more interesting compositing and design.