Top 10 Design tips

Your poster will be published online or displayed on a bulletin board. Many other posters are already there in these places. Your poster will, therefore, be competing hard to grab the attention of people. To compete for the audience’s attention, your poster must stand out. It should be a spectacular visual. When people pass by the poster, they should have a more in-depth look to read the content. If that does not happen, then the design needs improvement. A professional graphic designer should create your poster with new concepts and unique use of colors and typefaces. The idea here is to make it look unique so that people can read your content and the message.

Most poster designs are meant for print projects, which require you to create mini posters as well. Remember that your client will be using the poster in various places to extract maximum advantages from both the online and offline platforms. It would be good if you can create different versions of your poster using a poster template. The design should be such that it looks equally effective in its mini version. When an image in the poster is scaled down, it should still look good enough to be shared on social media. Even when the poster design is scaled down to the size of a postcard, each detail must be clearly visible.

If you’ve got an active Office 365 subscription, and you’ve downloaded the latest version of PowerPoint, you have the Zoom option on the Insert tab. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are three Zoom options:

• Summary Zoom
• Section Zoom
• Slide Zoom The Zoom feature is great when you want to jump from one section or slide to another. Let’s say you want to go from Slide 10 to Slide 55. In a regular PowerPoint presentation, you’d have to go through slides 11 to 54. But with Zoom,  you can instantly go from slide 10 to 55 before your audience has a chance to lose interest. Of course, you’d have to plan ahead and know which slide you want to skip to. The Summary Zoom feature creates a summary slide which is similar to a ‘table of contents’ for your slides. You can insert this summary slide anywhere you want, it doesn’t have to be the first slide in your presentation. The Section Zoom feature allows you to jump from one section to another, while the Slide Zoom feature allows you to jump to any slide in your presentation.

To err is human; to forgive, divine. Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism" People make mistakes, but they shouldn’t (always) have to suffer the consequences. There are two ways to help lessen the impact of human error:

• Prevent mistakes before they happen
• Provide ways to fix them after they happen You see a lot of mistake-prevention techniques in ecommerce and form design. Buttons remain inactive until you fill out all fields. Forms detect that an email address hasn’t been entered properly. Pop-ups ask you if you really want to abandon your shopping cart (yes, I do, Amazon—no matter how much it may scar the poor thing). Anticipating mistakes is often less frustrating than trying to fix them after the fact. That’s because they occurbefore the satisfying sense of completion that comes with clicking the “Next” or “Submit” button can set in. That said, sometimes you just have to let accidents happen. That’s when detailed error messages really come into their own. When you’re writing error messages, make sure they do two things:
• Explain the problem. E.g., “You said you were born on Mars, which humans haven’t colonized. Yet.”
• Explain how to fix it. E.g., “Please enter a birthplace here on Earth.” Note that you can take a page from that same book for non-error situations. For instance, if I delete something, but it’s possible to restore it, let me know that with a line of copy like “You can always restore deleted items by going to your Trash and clicking Restore.” The principle of anticipating user error is called the poka-yoke principle. Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that translates to “mistake-proofing.”

One of the essential tricks to catch the eye is to incorporate one big image that they can see from a reasonable distance. You can choose an illustration or text, a photo or a big image. You should consider a close-up of faces or design elements, illustrations, scenes, and even novelty typography. But you should select a visual carefully. A big and imposing picture in the middle or top of the poster will not only catch the eye, but it will also help in driving the customers. The big image will linger on in the memory of the viewers for a long time, which is helpful in building your brand identity as well.

Now, mimicking the settings of one object to the other is just a click away. The eyedropper functionality, which was first introduced in Adobe Illustrator to copy the color, fill and stroke from one object to another, was an overnight success. Immediately, the same feature is used in Adobe InDesign, which helps the designers much better than the former. To copy and apply the style from one parent object to the children objects do the following. Select the children elements which you want to affect. Choose the eyedropper tool and click on the parent object. You can choose to carry on the same process by double-clicking on the eye dropper tool in InDesign. An options box appears with various selection and de-selection options.