109. Graphic design tips for all my DIY entrepreneur friends! [QUICK MINUTE]

In this QUICK MINUTE with Shana, I share my best branding and graphic design tips for all my do-it-yourself entrepreneurs out there! If you're using tools like Canva and Squarespace to DIY your marketing materials such as landing pages, lead magnets, website and more this will help you keep your designs pleasing to the eye!

Grab my free guide (and see my branding tips in use) with my Become and IGTV Superstar Guide! I teach you everything you need to know on how to create rocking IGTV videos that get attention! GRAB IT HERE

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everyone, welcome to the dream hustle podcast, the show that shares authentic and unfiltered advice on how to build and grow a successful dream business online. I'm your host Shana recker. I'm a business, an online entrepreneur and I love helping women bust through the fears and find strategies to make their dream business come to life. My guess. And I keep everything super real here for you guys with our stories and tips for success. So let's dig in to today's episode. Okay guys, today's five star review is by Mj genning and Mj says find your passion and get to it. So Gem Jay says, easy to listen to you, not too long. Great, easy to do. Now ideas, a minute or a few with Shana. Check out her free courses too. So Mj, thank you so much for this five star review. It really means the world to me to hear that what we're doing here on the dream hustle podcast is helping you guys in your businesses. So if you would like to leave a five star review, you can do that on iTunes at Itunes, on your iPhone or you can go to Shana recker.com and learn how to the a review right there. It's in the podcast under podcast reviews. So I, we all of the instructions on how to do it. All right everyone, let's jump into today's episode. Hey everyone, welcome to this quick minute with Shaina today. I have some tips for you on designing any of your, your brand, any of your materials, any of yours or whether it be your optins, your websites, um, any kind of printed materials you're creating for your clients. I'm going to give you my, a couple of quick design tips for those of you guys who are out there doing this stuff on your own. And I love how, I mean I'm a graphic designer by trade, so that's my background. Um, I still love doing graphic design. I still do a lot of my own graphic design and my husband's also a graphic designer, so we're still very involved in the branding space and he is, um, for sure. Um, but there's a lot of, and I, and I totally believe that if you want it done, you know exceptionally well and right, you know, working with the graphic designers is always a good way to go. But with that being said, not everybody can always afford to hire a graphic designer to do all their print materials and there are some great resources out there to allow entrepreneurs to really just build their own materials when they need to. And I want to talk to you guys. So first of all, you know, when you're creating your optins or your lead magnets or creating booklets or you're creating, um, you know, any kind of materials that you want to, um, that are going to enhance your business or help you build an email list or whatever. Canva is what I absolutely recommend. I use Canva myself, even though I have all the design programs, I still sometimes just pop into Canva to create stuff because it's just easy. Um, and I love how Canva allows you to upload your fonts and put your brand colors there and upload your logos and all the things so that you can quickly go in and create documents and pieces for your business. Um, so I absolutely recommend that to my students and I teach them how to use that. And I think it's a great design tool. Um, same with website building. I mean, there are so many great kind of DIY website, um, building companies out there like Squarespace and wix. Um, we're, you know, you don't necessarily have to hire a designer, let's say to build you a website. Um, you can kind of plug and play some of these things yourself. So for those of you who are out there, DIY in it and doing it yourself, um, I want to give you guys some tips for designing in those spaces. Um, because oftentimes what I see is when people, uh, when, when I work with my clients, when they're working on their optins and Canva and stuff, they'll share their links to their documents with me. And then I go in and I show them how to tighten up their design and I'll go in and tweak some stuff for them so that it just, um, just really cleans it up for them. And I see the same things over and over again when they share their documents with me. And so those are the tips that I want to give you guys today. So first and foremost, when we talk about branding, um, especially, you know, I talk about this with my dream has a students is we actually have a whole chapter, a whole class on branding, but some of the tips in that class are, is to, to keep it simple, right? So don't have four or five different fonts, you know, in one document and keep it down to one headline font, one subhead font and one body copy font. And that's it. You don't need to have tons of different fonts because at the end of the day, when people are looking at materials, whether it's your optin or your website, a confused I a confused mind says no and shuts it off, turns it off to shuts it down. It doesn't like it, it's going to move away from it because it's going to be confused. It's going to be messy and it, it can't see it. It can't, it can't decipher what it should be looking at. So instead of trying to figure it out, it just says no. So keeping it simple by having in no more than three brand front fonts, no more than two to two to three colors in your branding and really keeping it super simple like that. Um, so that's going to help you immensely just by just starting with that basic principle when it comes to creating your brand. Now when it comes to creating your optins for instance, again, keeping in mind the headline font, the sub had fun in the body copy font. I often see people try and use Serafin fonts for their body copy and a serif font. For those of you guys who maybe don't know or the fonts that have like the little wings that kind of flip out on that, on the edges of the letters, the their little feet, little things that you could see. Um, to me, I find that that's a, a font that's hard to read. So using a sans Serif Font, which is a font that just doesn't have the feed, it's like a clean, like an aerial or how bad it[inaudible] for those of you guys who may know those, those terms, something that's very clean. So I mean that's very easy to read, you know, keeping it, um, just just nice and neat looking. Lots of white space, you know, that's the other thing I see when people share their designs with me, they have their fonts going edge to edge. The have their words going edge to edge on the paper they have. Everything is so full. You've got it. I'd rather see you have more pages in your document and more white space than everything trying to be jammed in onto one page. And same with your websites. Again, it's gotta be, it has to have white space, has to have spots for the eye to be able to kind of see in between to have those breaks. So when you're designing, just keep that in mind. Clean, simple fonts. Now you can have like a serif font or a script font for your sub heads or your headers if you want to have something fun. But really trying to keep the stuff that's important for people to read, like dates and information and the content that has value, that stuff has to be easy to read. Easy. Did I just so simple clean fonts, um, so that people can easily read that information. And same with graphics. Like it's, it's hard to read things if you've got, you know, graphics like going through it and behind your fonts. So trying to keep those spaces really clean and say with your website, don't overcomplicate it with a whole bunch of pictures and, and you know, design elements and all those things. As much as sometimes those things are pretty and fun. If it makes it hard to read and hard for the eye to see what it needs to see, again, people will click off. So, um, you know, really keeping your documents clean and, and you know, nowadays it's great because everything's electronic. So your pdf can be six pages, it can be three pages. It can be however many pages it needs to be. Um, although I will say the shorter, the better. When it comes to your lead magnets, people need short, easy information to digest. But if it happens to spread across three pages, just so that you get that white space, you can get it clean so you can get it easy to see and follow, then it's awesome cause we're in an electronic age. People open up, PDFs read what they need to read and close it. You know, it's not like you're creating a piece that has to be printed at a printer and needs to be an even amount of pages. Right. So it's nice that we have the flexibility to do that. The other thing, um, design wise is again, colors. Colored Fonts can be really hard to read as a body copy. So I'd rather see you use a dark gray or a black than to try and make your body copy fonts purple or pink or orange. Those are hard to read, especially on white backgrounds and even harder to read on dark backgrounds. So as often, you know, as much as possible, trying to avoid putting large chunks of coffee on top of dark backgrounds, that's a lot harder for the eye to read. It's a lot. It's more strenuous on the eye and people will want to not read it. They'll want to click off. So clean designs, lots of white space use, you know, one to three fonts, Max, one to three colors Max, making sure that your body copy fonts are a dark gray or a dark or a block on a white page or a light colored page of possible. Um, don't fill it up with tons of images and pictures and graphics. It's fun to use those install spaces. Um, but it doesn't necessarily need to be like that. People are looking to get the information they need and you apply it right away. So if you're filling it, overfilling it with too many pictures and graphics and it's too distracting, they may not read it, they may not even open it for that matter. So clean and simple. And same with your website. Keep the same principles, apply to your website. Clean, simple, easy to follow. Not a ton of stuff all over the place. Nice white space, clean fonts, clean colors and you're good to go. So for those of you guys out there doing it yourself, it's like a huge shout out to you guys. Cause I know it's not always easy, right? Sometimes for you guys out there as entrepreneurs, you're having to pick up new skills that maybe you didn't know before or maybe you've never tried or done before. But um, I promise you the stuff gets easier and easier as you continue to keep doing it. If you, if you apply these simple rules to when you're designing, you're going to have more success when people actually downloading, reading and using those materials and give you good feedback and sharing it and all those kinds of things. So keep it super simple. And if you want to check out, uh, an example, my free opt in@shanarecker.com one you can see my website and how I've constructed that and to my free opt in is there on how to be an Instagram TV superstar because Instagram TV is one of the hottest, fastest growing video platform is right now. If you are in business, you should be using Instagram TV and I teach you how to do all of that in my free opt in. And it shows you how I do use it. Really clean design, really easy to read fonts, um, simple colors. So you can check that out at[inaudible] dot com you can see an example of how to do a nice clean often, but then you can also get a great content is there as well. So that's it for me guys. I hope you're having an amazing day. I hope you found this helpful. If you did, please let me know. Share it with me. Screenshot those ordinary Instagram stories. Tag me with a tip or a takeaway. I'd love to be able to send you some love in your inbox. And yeah, that's it for me guys, so have an amazing week.

Speaker 2: 11:25

We'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.[inaudible].