Five Rules For Easier Marketing Design

Rob’s 5 Quick and Dirty Marketing Design Rules, the 2021 edition

With all the easy use design tools out there, from Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and our own online Design Studio, it becomes easy to create any kind of marketing material you need without the need to pay for professional designers. Of course the problem is that because it’s so easy it’s also easy to end up creating a complete mess or spending too much time on it when you could be out there growing your business. So updating my article on the subject from 2013 to reflect the changes of the marketing environment and to help you make the best use of your time and effort with these simple rules to follow.

When I design any marketing material I always have the 5+10+15 Second Rule foremost in my mind. I explain it in more detail here but here’s the simple overview. You have only 5 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they move on to the next thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a flyer, a social media post, a video, a proposal. You have to hook them with a problem, question, or a situation that needs an answer too. The next 10 seconds you have to give that answer or solution in a compelling way that will make them want to learn more about business. The last 15 seconds is spent supplying more reasons why they should contact you now. After that you can spend any extra time you want extolling the other reasons why your business is the one they should be dealing with. It’s as simple as that.

How you work this rule depends on what you are using to do your marketing with. In a video, you’ve got five seconds before that skip add button pops up so you better ‘make it march.’ On a website you have to have that impact in the very first section they see when they reach you. (I would recommend that you check that when people visit your site for the first time something has loaded in the first 5 seconds, or they will move on from your site.) In a flyer you have to have that punch in the ‘headline’ of the page to make them interested enough to read the rest of it before it’s thrown in the bin. No matter what, you have no more than half a minute to make your case and to get them to choose your business.

Choose a set of colours for your look

Modern computer software makes it easy to make everything you get printed a rainbow of colour, and improving colour printing costs makes it more tempting than ever. In a word, don’t. Do use colour as it helps identify you, evoke a mood, grab someone’s eyes, just pick your colours carefully. This website is a great example of it, we use a lot of colour but as a way to highlight key areas to draw the eye, while the main part is easy to read black and white. You don’t have to use black and while, just pick a base colour then use the complimentary colours to make it easy to read. This Wikipedia article is a good starting point on the idea of complementary colours.

If you don’t want to get into the world of colour theory, I’ve always worked on the rule of two plus two. You have two colours that are found in the majority of your material and images. If your logo is well designed then you should have your two base colours from that alone. They should be very distinct from each other to make it easy to see and read, a very bright or light colour and a very dark one. Then pick one slightly lighter or darker version of your dark colour and a lighter or darker shade of your bright colour. Now you have your two plus two colours for all your material from flyers to car wraps. If you want to have even more room for design work you could include both lighter and darker variations of your two base colours giving you a range of six to choose from. Here’s an example of how this process works.

Pick three fonts

I’ve come to the opinion that people are addicted to fonts. They will pick the wildest combination of styles on their documents, sometimes getting wrapped up on how fancy everything looks at the cost of readability. Remembering the 5 + 10 + 15 Second Rule, picking the wrong choices of fonts will work against this as people have to struggle to read your material. I go into more detail about fonts here but the basic rule is pick a headline font as your attention grabber, pick a good body font for general text, and a contrasting font for highlighting key points. What do we mean by Headline, Body, and Contrast? Headline fonts are designed for single lines of text that are printed much larger than the rest of the document to stand out and mark each section of information – such as the headings in this article. Because Headline fonts are meant to be bigger and shorter you can have a more complex or busy type and still be readable. A Body font is the type that does most of the work of your document. It has to be readable at all sizes and be usable for long blocks of text. The Contrast font is the one that is used to pick out a bit of the text to catch the eye and make it stand out in larger blocks of text or to serve as an in between the Headline and the Body fonts. An example of it is here in this paragraph with the way we have made the text ‘5 + 10 + 15 Second Rule’ stand out.

Again your logo will be your starting point for this as you want all your material to match the look of your logo. If your designer has done their job right, those three font choices should already be part of your logo or part of the material they have created. If not the type used for your business name will serve as the headline font, then stick to a more traditional type for the body just use a bold and/or italic version for the contrast type. Another option is that many fonts come with condensed / narrow or wide/demi versions of the same type which gives you the contrast without needing another font to do it.

Less is more & there’s always room on the back

This is the companion to 5 + 10 + 15 Second Rule. There’s always the need to get the most out of every item you design. The problem is the more you cram into it, the busier it becomes and the harder it is to read. It’s better to make 3 good points backed up by extra evidence or testimonials than to have 12 brief ones. This article follows the principle of the rule. I could fill it with the dozens of rules about marketing design I’ve found, but instead I’ve kept to the key ones I’ve used the most. Keeping it short gives it more impact and makes it simpler to keep up to date as your business changes and hopefully grows.

Remember too that we live in a digital age. Most people make their first contact with your business through your website. Many will also make their decision about your business through the first page on the website. Now the temptation is to cram everything in on that page but the truth is that most people never scroll down to the bottom unless they are forced to. If you stick to the  5 + 10 + 15 Second Rule for the main page, you can have plenty of linked sub pages where you will have the room to go into more detail for those who want it.

For physical marketing, what seems to be a common mistake is that printing the second side of a flyer or business card doesn’t add much to the overall cost of them. A large part of the cost of printing is setting things up and the finishing work like trimming or folding. Putting ink on the second side is not that much more to having to print the first side. Printing the second side gives you the space to put useful secondary information for people to read. Secondary information can be testimonials, technical information, lesser points to add extra support to the main ones. The other advantage is that halving the size of a flyer and making it double sided means that you get better cost per unit which is good for everyone.

Have a set of reusable parts

One of the common mistakes I see when people do their own marketing design is to just put together what  they have to hand. They will grab graphics off the internet, use which fonts they have on the computer, if they are able to maybe a ready made template generated by word. What comes out of it can sometimes look like it’s come from a different company, or just unprofessional. If you have spent money on a designer to come up with a logo and things like business cards, then the additional cost of setting up a design guide and a few templates at the same time isn’t that much. So what is a Design Guide?

A Design Guide is a simple document that contains a lot of the information I’ve given here. Things like fonts, colours, how things are positioned on a page, versions of logos and graphics designed for use on screens, in prints, vehicles, screen printing, and so on. If the designer has done the job right, you should have all the different versions of the graphics, the required fonts, and even templates for common things like business cards, letters, and flyers, all set up for instant use. It also helps if in the future you have to go to a different designer as they will then have all the information they need to replicate the work in the minimum amount of time.

If you are trying to do it yourself, all you need to do is create a base document with all the colours, fonts, graphics put on to it. Then when it’s time to create a new item, make a copy of that base document, add and delete what you need and save it. Each time you need something new, go back to that base document and use it again. This way everything you create will have the same look and feel which improves the professional finish of it and reduces the amount of time needed to create it.

In Conclusion

As in all well written articles let’s go back over the Five Rules to in a quick reminder version.

5+10+15 Second Rule

You have a very limited amount of time to get people’s attention before they move on to the next thing. 5 seconds to grab their attention, 10 seconds to make your pitch, and 15 seconds to close the deal. After that you have time to include secondary information for those who want to know more.

Choose a set of colours for your look

Start with your logo. You need one bright and one dark colour. You can have two or four more colours by lightening and darkening those bright and dark colours. Now only use these four or six colours in everything that you create to maintain a consistent and professional look.

Chose just three fonts

Too many different fonts is the same mark of unprofessional design as having too many colours. Your headline font is used only sparingly and is the one used in your logo. Most of the text should be in a clean, easy to read font that works from very small to very large. A contrast font is chosen for situations where you need to make more impact.

Less is more & there’s always room on the back

You need to keep things short and to the point with the limited attention window you have with people. Keep the key information front and center, and have sub pages on your website or use the back of the flyer to contain the extra information for those who need it.

Have a set of reusable parts

Using a set of standardised parts for all your marketing materials. It maintains a consistent look which makes everything look more professional. It also speeds up the process of creating new items, saving you time and money.

Of course there are a lot more tips and tricks that can be use in designing marketing material, some of which are covered here in this blog. The rest are still packed inside the heads of us here at Copy Express so why not book an appointment and let us help you get the most out of your marketing material.