To explain further what kerning is, it is “the spacing between letters or characters in a piece of text.” Just because something is spaced out evenly, doesn’t mean it will look balanced. This is because different letters have different shapes with different amounts of negative space. This is the first and most obvious mistake. It is not surprising as kerning text doesn’t come easy and usually good kerning is learnt through observing thousands of logos and typefaces but also designing them.
This mistake is like the one with kerning, as the same principle applies. Shapes that are spaced out evenly in the mathematical sense may not look right and seem off-balance because of the negative space. The simplest and quickest example here would be to use a set of letters with flat sides as well as curves and negative spaces. When designing different geometries, always keep in mind that manual spacing is most effective when dealt with a variety of shapes as you can see in the example.
his is a common mistake in entry level businesses, but anyone can fix it very easily and quickly. If you just started your business, you are probably establishing yourself digitally first. Usually you only need 2 fonts for this purpose. One font for headings and subheadings (best to choose one with different styles – bold, italic, medium, regular etc…) while the other font is just for body text.
This is debated even in the design industry. I often see logos using gradients like on the left logo. I argue that if there is a grey area in a transition between two colours, you must add in another colour to smooth the transition out. However, there are many logos, graphics and a few graphic designers that would disagree with me. Should gradient transitions be smoothed by adding additional colours? You get rid of the grey area, but you are also adding in an additional colour to the brand… This is not a simple decision to make and many factors must be considered by the designer who is building your brand.
Of course, not all gradients are going to have this grey area. This issue appears mostly when transitioning from one complementary colour to another.
It is really simple to spot this. If you want to read it, make it readable… Too often I see images that don’t have high enough contrast to the text, and so the text simply gets lost. Above you can see two examples that I quickly found from the web.
If you can’t find contrasting images, and you are unable to do colour grading, adding a drop shadow to the text is a solution. Although the drop shadow effect is out of trend for years and makes the graphics look cheap, it is better to use it as a solution because sometimes practicality is more important than visuals themselves.
A website redesign is a big task and a big investment; and it does pay out in the long run. Just like brand building, it doesn’t bring results straight away.
