11 rules you learned in Design School that you should start breaking today.

Stop obeying the voices of long lost professors. They never meant for you to be listening to them this many years later into your career.

This article is an excerpt from my “I’ll use Papyrus If I Want Too Article Found here

Breaking the Rules (Supplement)

Below are the list of rules that I articulated above. Beneath them, you’ll find my best explanation for the “why” behind the rule. Let me know if it is helpful, if I missed something or if there is something more that you you’d like me to help you understand.

• Don’t use gradients
• Don’t stroke type
• Don’t stack type
• Don’t use more than 3 colors
• Don’t center the focal point
• Don’t use more than two typefaces, (Serif and Sans Serif)
• Don’t combine two serifs or two sans serifs.
• Don’t use layer styles, filters or special effects
• Don’t use free or highly stylized fonts
• Don’t use Papyrus
• For the love of God, don’t use comic sans.
• And a dozen or so more.

There were also a few always do’s like:

• Always use a grid
• Always create hierarchy
• Always remove one thing

Don’t Use Gradients

Professorial Limitation

Gradients are special effects that are easily accomplished with graphic software. The smooth perfect blend from one color to the next is attractive, especially to neophyte designers who haven’t had an opportunity to understand what effective communication should accomplish. Gradients have gone in and out of vogue many times since I graduated in 2006. They become trendy and acceptable and then get overused and misused and the industry declares them the devil.

Screw the trends. Pursue the appropriate. You’ll live longer.

Where they become inappropriate is when:

• they are used arbitrarily or as pure decoration
• they are used heavy handedly without subtlety or nuance.
• they become garish because of the colors that are juxstaposed.
• in some applications, gradients are problematic (Logos etc.)

Using them well requires:

• Using them to communicate (Transformation, Change, Movement etc.)
• Keeping them graceful with appropriate color juxtaposition

Don’t Stroke Type

Professorial Limitation/Crafstmanship

Typefaces are composed of carefully crafted shapes that adhere to a set of proportions and visual rhythms between the positive and negative space. When we put a stroke on type, we actually change these shapes as the stroke covers the outer most contours of the letterform. This throws all of the relationships within the typeface out of balance and unity and changes the typeface fundamentally.

One reason that designers might put a stroke on type is to create contrast from the background. Simply applying a stroke will deteriorate the integrity of the typeface. Instead, if necessary, layer your type by copying it, and then adding a stroke to the bottom layer at the thickness that you desire. Next, paste in front the original text. This will allow the typeface to sit on top of the stroke, preserving its shape and positive/negative space relationships.

Notice how the type physically changes shape when the stroke is applied. The joints of the “r”, “k” and “n” appear brittle. The thicker the stroke, the more this occurs.

Don’t Stack Type

Professorial Limitation/Craftsmanship Issues

Type is meant to be read left to right in Western Culture. We identify words by the sequence of letters and their shape related to ascenders and descenders. When we stack type, we eliminate these relationships and reduce legibility to consideration of one letter at a time. Since legibility is of paramount concern in typography, stacking type is typically frowned upon.

That being said, sometimes stacking type is unavoidable, particularly in signage. Simultaneously, sometimes stacking type is actually a clever and meaningful avenue of expression. When this is the case, craftsmanship and legibility become a huge concern.

With stacked type, you should seek to facilitate legibility as much as possible. When the letterforms are moved from a horizontal sequence to a vertical sequence, each letterform must be considered individually and assimilated into the sequence of the previous letters. This means adjusting space around and between the letters is very important. It also means working from a central axis rather than a left-aligned axis, and it means that even with the central axis, you need to manage the space to the left and right so that a consistent implied edge is apparent for both, lest your negative space feel erratic and unconsidered.

Here are some considerations for stacking type effectively.

• Use Capital Letters to mitigate the uneven edges and create balance.
• If possible, choose fonts that support even edges. Some won’t
• Keep your word lengths short.
• Give enough leading to facilitate baseline to baseline movement.

Comparison of Avenir Black to Din Bold

Avenir is a geometric font that uses circles and squares to build the letterforms. The square and circle create wider proportions in some letterforms like “O” requiring more variance between the proportions of the individual letterforms.

Din was designed to be applied at large proportions to signage and other external visual applications across the German lanscape using handtools like the compass, ruler and a grid. This was meant to facilitate consistent quality in typographic application across signage and other wayfinding systems. For this reason, Din is easeir to get a better looking stack. The proportions are designed to work more easily in a vertical lock up.

Don’t Use More Than Three Colors

Principle

To understand this one, we first have to do a little heavy lifting with the principles of Unity and Variety. Unity and Variety are two sides of the same principle Harmony, which refers to the amount of agreement among the elements in your design. Compositions that have a high degree of unity tend to feel more soothing, reassuring, quiet, etc. Compositions that have high levels of variety tend to feel more agitating, unnerving, and loud.

The amount of unity or variety that a design has will impact the amount of tension it can create in the audience. More unity will relieve tension and more variety will create tension. This is because as you increase variety you also increase cognitive load. Cognitive load manifests as tension, anger, frustration, agitation in the body. Thinking actually burns calories and our brains are still functioning in hunter/gatherer mode where burning too many calories thinking could be dangerous. More to process means more calories burned, which means more discomfort.

I tend to think of unity and variety as polar opposites existing on the extreme ends of a continuum with most works of art existing somewhere in between. Go too much toward unity and the design get’s really boring. Go too much toward variety and the design becomes chaotic and hard to draw meaning from.

Continuums are helpful ways to visiualize relationships in visual design.

Color Schemes are really just relationships between colors that create varying degrees of unity or variety. A Monochromatic scheme composed on just one hue and it’s shades and tints is capable of creating a high degree of variety, but because there is only one hue present, it still unifies the piece across the space. A Tetrad which combines two sets of complimentary hues equidistant on the color wheel brings four hues and all of their shades and tints into the design. There is an exponential increase of color to process along with the other shapes, lines, values etc.

In 2016, I developed the Color/Tension Continuum to help manage a large color palette, directing designers to use certain color schemes to create a particular tone in the design.

Limiting your palette to three colors helps you maintain control over one of the most powerful elements in the designer’s arsenal. More than three colors with their variety of shades and tints will introduce a lot of cognitive load. It also demonstrates a degree of control over color and allows you to build symbolic relationships between them. When you learn to control color, and use the innate variety that comes with its shades and tints, three colors is usually more than enough.

Going back to Stelfreeze, we see his use of a split-complimentary scheme.

Finally, working with three colors or less will create relationships between the colors such as two cool colors juxtaposed against a warm color or vice versa. With the Analogous scheme, three colors next to each other on the color wheel, you get the variety of three colors all unified by the presence of a common hue. For example, Violet, Blue-Violet and Blue all share a common hue of Blue. Across the space, the presence of blue will create unity even if there is a lot of other content to process. Try limiting your palette and see how much more it elevates your design.

Don’t Center The Focal Point

Principle

There are a few principles exerting influence over this best practice. Proportion, Emphasis, and Balance all play a role in the overall discouragement of focal points being centered in the design. Below, I’ll do my best to introduce these with as much brevity as possible, but don’t be fooled into thinking that this is comprehensive. A rigorous study of each principle is necessary to tap their true potential.

Proportion

Proportion is a principle of design concerned with size and space relationships. How we organize the space and the relation of elements within the space impacts how our design is perceived and interpreted. It isn’t wise to simply start placing elements in the empty space. You must consider the space as part of the design, understanding it’s proportions and dividing it accordingly.

There are a few key proportional relationships that designers utilize to divide the space and create what are known as “power-points,” places in the space where the most pleasing position for focal points would exist relative to the proportions of the space. There are three common and easy to internalize methods for dividing the space and finding the powerpoints. These include the rule of thirds, the golden ratio (presented here in a shorthand and infinitely easier to apply method) and the golden spiral.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is implemented by dividing the space into three columns and three rows and placing your focal point at one of the 4 intersections of the guide lines. This will always move the focal point off center both vertically and horizontally. It will position your focal point to the left or right and leave room for other elements and background. In artforms like film and comics, the background tells as much story as the actual character and this method leaves space to exploit that possibility.

Notice that the Joker’s upper body and face tend to orbit around the upper right focal point.

Golden Mean

The golden mean works off of the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. I was taught to multiply the 1:1.618 ratio by three and then round to get a rough 3:5 ratio that is close enough to get the same effect. What this means is that to use the Golden Ratio to divide your space, create eight vertical columns in the space and 8 horizontal rows and then place your powerpoint at the third line in any direction.

In the Golden Mean, the powerpoint falls at the third line where three columns or three rows are juxstaposed against the remaining five.

The Character’s eyes and face fall at the third equal increment from the top of the frame.

Websites and other designs can also use this proportional relationship to create a content grid.

Golden Spiral.

The Golden Spiral is a proportional device created when the overall proportions of the space can be divided into a perfect square and a remaining rectangle that can also be divided into a perfect square and rectangle, infinitely. The spiral touches the intersection of the the square and the rectangle creating a series of powerpoints to place points of interest on a path leading to the optimal powerpoint that exists at the center of the spiral.

The Golden Spiral leads to an aesthetically pleasing powerpoint in the space and provides a path to place other subserviant elements.

In this frame, the focal point is the woman’s face, but the position of the man creates a pleasing and story-forwarding path for the viewer’s eye to follow through the scene.

Balance

In design, the principle of Balance concerns itself with organizing elements in the space so that the space feels equally weighted and activated. When the designer fails to achieve balance, the cognitive load increases and can drive viewers away from the design before meaning is transferred. Designers can push balance to extremes, but they still must achieve it at a minimal degree for a design to achieve reconciliation with the viewers demand for it.

There are four types of balance:

• Symmetry
• Asymmetry
• Approximate Symmetry
• Radial Symmetry

For the sake of brevity, I’ll only discuss Symmetry and Radial Symmetry here.

Symmetry is created when a vertical or horizontal axis is established and elements are mirrored exactly on both sides of the axis. This repetition creates a high degree of unity and predictability, making it less interesting and dynamic than Assymetry. Radial Symmetry creates a vertical and horizontal axis and mirroring occurs in the four quadrants that are created. Radial Symmetry increases cognitive load a bit more and emphasizes the center of the composition because everythign seems to radiate out from it.

The predictability of the symmetrical or radially symmetrical design is usually easier to make sense of and can be perceived as boring. Some design like Advertising is meant to capture attention and so boring can be seen as a liability. That being said, there are instances where symmetry could create a conceptual advantage. In these instances, knowing what happens when symmetry is employed should set you free to use it or discard it as a viable design strategy.

Image Courtesy of Full Metal Jacket. Here Stanley Kubrik uses approximate symmetry to emphasis the predictable nature of bootcamp as the drill sargeant establishes dominance.

Image Courtesy of George Strouza: Here the strong central axis of the design and the easily processed nature of the shapes and colors leads the eye vertically downward toward the Zurich Olympic Logo, the the actual focal point of the design.

Emphasis

Emphasis is the principle of design that focuses on creating focal points and hierarchy. As designers, we must create discernible starting points and subordinate focal points for our audience to navigate the design. Failure to do this will result in cognitive load and compositions that are static, boring, or too difficult to navigate. If everything is important, then nothing is important.

There are four primary techniques for creating emphasis:

• Emphasis by Contrast — Making the focal point different
• Emphasis by Isolation — Separating the focal point in space
• Emphasis by Pointing — Making other elements point to the focal point
• Emphasis by Placement — Putting the focal point in an important area.

Emphasis by Placement

For the sake of brevity, I’ll only discuss Emphasis by Placement here. While the proportional strategies detailed above draw the focal point away from the center of the design, emphasis through placement justifies moving it back to the center if the rationale for doing so is solid. Moving the focal point to the center of the design will reduce the tension created by juxtaposing different amounts of space. It will calm the design down. In some cases where a high degree of unity is desirable, a centered focal point can help with the communication goal. So not centering the focal point really becomes a professorial limit, meant to break students out of the habit of centering, so they might pursue more dynamic compositions.

Photo Courtesy of Tamara Lackey. Here the centering of the girls face makes her the center of the world. Portrait Photography is a common example of centered focal points.

Centering the focal point is not against the rules, but when it is done arbitrarily, it typically diminishes the quality of the design. Instead of going through your career believing that it is against the rules, learn to understand how placement at the center can further the concept or meaning you are trying to communicate. Use it when appropriate and avoid it when not.

Don’t Use More Than Two Typefaces

Principle

Typically, students are admonished to use no more than two typefaces and these two typefaces are typically a combination of Serif and Sans Serif. The reasoning behind this is a combination of the principles unity and emphasis; in this case, emphasis by contrast.

“Consistency is one of the forms of beauty. Contrast is another.”

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Good, versatile, and useful typefaces typically have a variety of weights and many include itallics, oblique and condensed versions. Because of this, and just like color schemes, this versatility should provide all the variety of type that a designer needs to accomplish his or her goals related to the established typographic system on the design, and the establishment of hierarchy.

By typographic system, I mean that certain versions of the typeface can be used to establish rules for the content that the viewer can discern and use to navigate the content. An easy example of this would be to set the headline in bold, and the body copy in regular as we do here in this article. This facilitates scanning of the content, making it easier for the reader to find what he or she is looking for. The complexity of the content should be at least one consideration for the typeface you choose. You want to give yourself enough versatility to manage and systemize the content. This can almost always be done with one good, versatile typeface.

Introducing a second typeface brings a new problem. If the first typeface is a sans serif, that performs certain duties for the design, introducing a second sans serif that lacks sufficient contrast from the first will make the system harder to understand and even read as a mistake in the typesetting. So the best practice is to introduce a serif typeface that clearly distinguishes itself. This is the most clumsy form of the rule, and there is much nuance left to be discovered for the devoted student of typography. While the serif should distinguish itself from the sans serif, it should also still harmonize. Jeremiah Shoaf’s flawless typography check list does an excellent job explaining these intricacies and I highly reccomend it as a jumping off point for better typograpy.

Image courtesy of Jeremiah Shoaf’s Flawless Typography Checklist. Combining two serifs that don’t have sufficient contrast can read as a mistake and lower the craftsmanship of the design as well as break the system of navigation established by the weights.

Image courtesy of Jeremiah Shoaf’s Flawless Typography Checklist. It isn’t enough just to arbitrarily pick a serif to go with a sans serif. Certain Sans Serifs harmonize better with certain serifs. A good way to find serifs that harmonize with your sans serif is to look at the “stress” in the “o” and match these orientations up between your two fonts.

Typography is a discipline so broad and so deep that a designer could spend his or her whole career trying to understand it and still have much to learn. Typography however, is very much the foundation of good graphic design so you should invest in it significantly if you want to make work that is taken seriously. I recommend the Flawless Typography Checklist as a starting point, but I’d encourage you to invest in other seminal typography books as well. I reccommend Josef Muller Brockman’s Grid Systems and Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style as next steps.

Don’t Use Free or Highly Stylized Fonts Including Papyrus and Comic Sans

Professorial Limitation

Pretty much everything I said above about Papyrus applies here. Appropriateness is the question of the day. Professors tend to limit access to these fonts so that students are forced to find ways to use classic typefaces in a compelling way. It’s a safe bet that when you use a highly stylized typeface, your design will lose some sense of quality. This may be a legitimate perception or it may simply be an artifact of typographic elitism that pervades the industry. Also, be careful as many of the free fonts out there are created by amateurs and have craftsmanship flaws in them as well as poor tracking relationships etc. Many times when it comes to free fonts, you get what you pay for.

Before jumping to a highly expressive font, you should ask yourself, can I accomplish this another way, and then ask yourself a few more times. If you can’t then maybe its time to consider a very stylized typeface. Below are a few reasons where stylized typefaces might be justifiable.

Image Courtesy of Raygun Magazine: Here the type is distressed and augmented to mimic the texture and shapes that appear in the image.

It’s helpful to think of typefaces as shapes that represent sounds. If you can see a typeface as a set of unified shapes that represent sound then you can begin to examine their shapes as aspects of the imagery in the design. Going back to unity, we want our typography and our imagery to share common characteristics. This will create unity through repetition across the space. I’ve even gone so far as to commission a custom icon set based on the shape characteristics of our primary sans serif.

The typeface chosen for the wordmark here is constructed from the shame line weight and curve quality that we see in mark, creating unity between them.

When picking your first typeface, a few things to consider are:

• Is there some unity (repetition) between this font and the image.
• Is there enough variety (versatility) for the system I want to build
• Is there a connection between the purpose of this font and my needs? (Some fonts were designed for a specific purpose like Din that we discussed above Bell Gothic was designed to print on cheap phonebook paper without bleeding and filling in the counter spaces.)

Don’t Use Layer styles, Filters or Special Effects

Professorial Limitation

I think I’ve already covered this above, but I’ll touch on it here again.

Constraints and Creativity

Design is not about decoration, at least not only. Concept and communication are paramount to creating value beyond simple decoration. Typically, students in design school must be pushed beyond their exaltation of the software’s capabilities toward creation of real meaning, through composition and craft. For this reason, professors typically reject the use of special effects. The constraints on creativity push the student to find other ways to make the design visually compelling. Constraints are always a good ingredient for inspiring innovation and creativity.

“Constraints are always a good ingredient for inspiring innovation and creativity.”

Restraint and Nuance

Once you’ve come to understand concept, composition and craft as key elements for good design, it’s ok to take the rails off and open yourself up to these special effects. They should always only help the design. They should never become to point. They also shouldn’t scream in the space for no apparent reason. They are usually best implemented with restraint and nuance. You must use them with a light touch. Usually, they should only be visible to the extent that they add polish to the design. When they overwhelm the content, you’ve gone too far.

They also rarely function well in their default state. The default setting for drop shadows is pretty heavy handed and should be adjusted down in opacity and offset to make it more subtle.

Drop shadows are useful for creating a sense of depth and even helping with contrast in some cases, but your first instinct should be to solve the contrast issues with color or space. When a special effect like a drop shadow makes sense, use it with restraint, adjusting the settings to make only as visible as needed. Adjust the opacity down from the default 75%, and consider the amount of elevation from the background that you want to achieve. The light is affected by the promity of the figure to the ground. Drop shadows are meant to communicate depth and space between the figure that casts the shadow and the ground that reflects the shadow.

Always do’s

Always Use A Grid

Principle

People who never understand the purpose of a grid tend to become a slave to it. They look at the grid as some artificial intelligence that will solve the design problem for them. While the grid will create alignments and alignments will help the look of the design, the point of the alignment is not to create alignment but unity.

As discussed before, there are three primary techniques for creating unity. These include:

• Proximity — Putting things close together so they function as a group.
• Repetition — Repeating a motif across the space
• Continuation — Aligning edges and having objects flow into each other.

Repetition and Continuation are both facilitated by using a grid. Let’s tackle both of them. Grids indicate structure and reason within the page and create patterns of repetition across multiple pages like we see in books.

Grids are typically combinations of vertical columns and horizontal rows. The lowest understanding of the grid is that we hang elements like headlines, photos and body copy on these lines and in doing that we create alignment. There are a variety of strategies for deciding how many of each, rows and columns, but ultimately it is usually left up to the designer to decide how many of each he or she needs and in what proportions to each other. In the novice designer’s work, these decisions are usually pretty arbitrary, and this makes the grid vulnerable to change when the designer runs into a roadblock, and it also limits the power of the grid to organize and activate the space, because it is being used with out intentionality.

Designing the Grid for a Purpose.

As we discussed earlier, cognitive load impacts the tension a viewer might experience when looking at a design. Lower degrees of variety will reduce cognitive load and soothe the viewer while higher degrees of variety will increase cognitive load and agitate the viewer. This gives us a starting point when we consider our grid.

If our grid is meant to create unity and structure within the page and repetition across the book, then we must first understand the content we are designing and build our grid to accomodate it. Then we must decide based on the content we are organizing how much tension is appropriate for the design and build a grid that allows us to achieve the right amounts of unity and variety. This is accomplished by articulately deciding how much complexity and variety our grids can support. The more Columns and rows you create, the more variety you are capable of achieving, and vice versa. A very simple grid will limit your options while a complex grid will provide many. Simple grids will force you to repeat arrangements more often while complex grids will allow freedom to avoid much noticeable repetition at all. The designer must use this power strategically to push his audience to the brink of cognitive load tolerance and no further. Pushing the viewer past this point could result in a rejection of the material. I’ve seen this happen quite a bit, especially with design books where the designer get’s too ambitious, and the pages become so chaotic that the reader gives up trying to read.

Grids across time can be used to create rhythmic repetition that also enhance unity. They can also be used with other elements like color to progressively alter a color scheme in a sequence so that the color changes to fit the time in the book.

Using a grid is almost never a bad idea, but learning to understand and shape its purpose will help you make better choices where the grid becomes the constraint that facilitates creativity rather than hindering it.

Always Create Hierarchy

Principle

The more I interact with young designers, the more I find that they don’t understand hierarchy. Even some professors that I’ve seen publishing books equivocate hierarchy to a principle of design. I believe it is not a principle but an outcome of good design. Hierarchy is the creation of dominant and subservient relationships between elements in a design. It’s making the appropriate things important in a descending order of most to least and this relationship should help the viewer nagivate the design and encounter the information in an appropriate way so that he or she is able to draw meaning from it.

Hiearchy is accomplished through proportional relationships, and through contrast and positioning which are techniques of the principle of emphasis. Hierarchy is intentional consideration of the content and ranking it for importance. It is part of the job to create navigation through the design. If we fail here and hierarchy is achieved accidentally, our viewers may become confused and jump out of the engagement with the design before they’ve drawn meaning and value from it.

The point of hierarchy is to create easy navigation and scaffold meaning. It isn’t an end by itself, but a means to an end that comes part and parcel with good design. There are many ways to create hierarchy, but the main thing is to simply consider it in an articulate way and design it rather than letting it happen arbitrarily.

Always Remove One Thing

??? Communication Theory…Maybe???

I’m not really sure if this is related to a principle, a craftsmanship issue or a professorial limitation. It’s just a good thing to keep in mind and do when it it possible and it lends itself to aspirations in design such as economy and simplicity.

The reason we combine text and image is to create redundancy so that one clarifies the other and vice versa. Redundancy is a component of the design that can be left out but when added, further clarifies the message. Entropic messages are messages where everything but the absolutely necessary have been removed. These usually manifest as pure text on a background with no images present, or as photos or illustrations with no text. The problem with entropic messages is that they can miscommunicate quite easily which is why combining with an image will strengthen them.

Three approaches to a banner ad where appropriate redundancy is built into the final design.

In the three banner ads above we see the impact of redundancy on the final communication. In the first banner, all imagery has been removed leaving on the words “The Porn Conversation Kit…Sponsored by Covenant Eyes.” At this point, I have little idea what this kit does besides facilitate a conversation about porn. If I am familiar with the brand of Covenant Eyes, then I can infer that it is probably a kit to help talk about the dangers and negative outcomes of porn. But most people aren’t familiar with the brand and many of those make assumptions that it is some kind of eye care company, so this kit could likely have something to do with my ability to see porn better.

In the second banner, we’ve added some imagery. The font is made to resemble the neon signage that we’ve learned in one way or another pervade the strip club atmospheres. This introduction of the imagery is a kind of redundancy, but is it appropriate for the content. I’m still not quite sure what this kit does. Is it meant to facilitate a better conversation between the viewer and the pornstar/exotic dancer? If so, then I think the customer is going to be let down and the company is going to be dealing with sub-optimal customers.

The third option shows a father and son having a conversation. We know they are a father and son because they look alike. That’s important because we don’t want strange men having conversations with young boys about porn. We also see the branding elements of Covenant Eyes and we have the text. Without the text, we have no idea what the boy and his dad are talking about, and without the picture, we’re left to wonder where and with whom this conversations is occurring. The text and the image draw clarity from each other and better communication occures. This is the power of redundancy and the integration of text and image.

The always remove one thing suggestion is meant to help designers be more critical about how much redundancy they are building into the design. Each element is additional cognitive load and a liability in a world of three second attention spans. Typically, the best designs have just enough redundancy to clearly communicate the meaning and we appreciate them more (especially as designers) for their economy. Go build your design and then if possible, remove that one extra detail that isn’t necessary and see what happens. You may need to remove 10 things, and in getting surgical with your work, you’ll likely discover better ways to approach creating the meaning that is the point of this work.

Conclusion

Obviously this is not comprehensive and maybe I’ve missed some important points. I’d love to hear about it and have a conversation with you. Through out this essay, I’ve worked to communicate the importance of appropriateness in design. Anything is viable as long as it is appropriate, but if you’re gonna break these rules, break them with the confidence that comes from having a strong rationale behind your decision.

It’s much easier to be critical of a design than it is start from scratch with empty space and toolbox full of elements. Many times we don’t know the constraints that people are working under and our social media driven world serves to bring out the worst in us and give us a platform to show it to the world.

Keep that in mind as you grow in your career and give feedback. Your first question should always be, does it feel appropriate? If it does, then it’s ok to be gracious and supportive. If it doesn’t, you’ll do the designer more service by helping them understand why it isn’t working. Always do this with generosity and care as your motivations rather than some self-serving need to feel superior.

If there is a rule you learned in school that I didn’t cover, reach out to me on Linked In and let’s talk about it. Maybe I can help. I’ll look forward to those opportunities to be of service. Thanks for reading this far. Please let me know how this article can be better.

About Me

Jason Walker is the Creative Director for Covenant Eyes and a free-lance designer for Tektonux LLC. He began his career in 1998 when he walked into a small local sign shop with a stack of illustration boards under one arm, and asked for a job. Since then, he’s worked for screen printers, newspapers, dot-coms, magazines, agencies and public school. He even drew caricatures on River Street in Savannah GA for a year.

Jason holds an M.F.A. in Graphic Design, and an M.A.T. in Teaching and Learning. He’s a Certified Brand Strategist and a Certified Brand Architect through the Level C brand education learning track. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the Executive Education: Customer Experience Certificate Program offered through the Z-School at Georgia Southern University.

His mission is to help designers elevate their professional esteem and their pay by learning to be more effective in the context of buisness. He lives in a small remote town in Georgia (where he can only get satellite internet) with his amazing wife of 14 years and his two adorable daughters.

Connect with me on Linked In