HOW TO SPOT BAD GRAPHIC DESIGN (AND A BAD GRAPHIC DESIGNER)?
It’s not that easy to spot a bad graphic design at first sight.
Jared Spool, the American writer, researcher, and usability expert, once said: “Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.”
Let’s figure out a list of fundamental points to avoid common misinterpretations and hire a bad graphic designer!
Communication Skills
An immediate way to spot a bad designer is by deepening its ability to understand what the users need, and then deliver that information. He won’t overload you (the client) with plenty of options to choose from, he will rather make the right questions (never too many) before starting the project.
Working with creatives isn’t easy for non-designers. But a good graphic designer already knows this.
Information Overload
It’s challenging when a big amount of information has to fit in a tiny space. This is one of the first signals of a designer’s ability. Knowing what to highlight and what to place on a secondary spot is the know-how for a skilled designer. They will understand what the users need, then design based on that, to help reduce information overload.
A clever way will be to go for visuals instead of text.
Ignoring Usability
Usability is everything today. Users won’t spend half a second trying figuring out how to navigate a website. Clever designs can backfire and hurt usability.
Clever designs should always be made as foolproof as possible, and/or tested on actual users.
Non-Original Content
If a graphic designer comes up with a mishmash of stock photos and vectors and just added the text from the brief it’s not a designer who gave some thought into what you need as a client.
Vectors, stock photos, and free illustrations are design elements that even non-designers can create a visual with, and a professional is expected to create something unique and creative.
Being a graphic designer means being original.
Misinterpreting the Audience
We all know how different generations, geographic locations, cultures, etc, have different perceptions of design. For example, different colors have different meanings in cultures all over the world. To a typical western audience, white means purity, but in China, white is a color for funerals.
Western audiences, for instance, perceive information left to right while Eastern cultures or Arabic native speakers right to left.
This means the focal point of the design has to adapt to its perception. If you’re working with freelance designers who are from a much different background than you, you’ll possibly need to state things that are obvious to you in your design brief.
Sometimes the tone of voice or aesthetic of the design has to fit a certain group’s tastes, so your designer needs to know the target audience they are designed for.
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