Not a designer but want to create the ultimate presentation, poster, or flier? Don’t fret, you probably know a designer somewhere. And design is easy, so they’ll gladly do it for free, especially if you show them something you saw recently (“Keep Calm and _____ On” is big, by the way). But if that doesn’t work, simply follow these 8 easy steps to creating amazing design. (Seriously, design is easy.)
- Use your brain to conjure up the layout and graphics. Don’t bother to look for inspiration or sketch. You’re designing, and designers don’t draw, duh.
- Open up Microsoft Word.
- Don’t use Times New Roman or whatever the default font is. That’s boring. The good news is, your PC comes with a bunch of great fonts like Papyrus (for making things look old-timey), Party LET (I don’t know what the LET stands for, but probably LET’s party), or Comic Sans (if you’re doing anything with kids).
- Bonus tip: do you know why designers prefer Mac? Because it comes with Zapfino, the perfect cursive font for really fancy events.
- Make the title really big, and then either make it all-caps, underline, and/or bold to really make it stand out. (All-caps works really well with cursive fonts, by the way.) If you’re really experienced you can use 3D text, too, but only if you’re really experienced!
- For the rest of the text, just remember to keep it simple. Make a bullet list of all the details for your event. Label each item for clarity, like: “Where: The Conference Room, When: 7:00pm, What: Fun Party,” etc.
- Spice it up with graphics! Did you know Google can search for more than websites? You can make it look for pictures. Just google what you need and then download whatever picture looks neat. In fact, in a lot of cases you can drag it straight from the search results and onto your document. (Don’t worry if it’s too small, we’ll address that in the next step.) Oh and if it has like light gray stuff on it with copyright symbols or something, don’t worry. That’s just for big businesses that can afford to pay for it. No one will notice if you put it on your thing.
- Resize your graphics to fit the space that you need it in. If you’re trying to make it taller without making it wider, just drag from one an edge instead of a corner.
- Use lots of colors. Like, change the background color and the font color to make it really stand out. Can’t decide on a background color? Just use a gradient and have both colors!
See? That wasn’t so hard. You didn’t need your designer friend after all. With just a little more practice (getting the hang of 3D text effects, for example), you, too, can start charging for graphic design. But you won’t be a jerk like your designer friend and you’ll do it for free if it’s easy enough.
Keep calm and design on!
