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How to Spot an Effective Design

-by Jason Amunwa

One of the hardest things to do as a client is objectively evaluate work submitted to you. After all, you’ve hired other people to do it for you because they’re the experts, right? Nowhere is this more true, in my humble opinion, than in the field of design. It’s easy to mistake design as the simple act of “making it pretty”, but a lot more goes into it than you’d think. Often, clients will make the mistake of allowing their personal preferences on colors, fonts, etc. to obscure what would otherwise be a logical and well-designed piece of communication.

Below, you’ll find a few tips on how to judge whether or not a design is objectively ‘good’ for your purposes – after all, you want to get the best design for your money, right?

Put yourself in your customers’/audience’s shoes

The very first thing you should do when looking at a design is forget about yourself. Unless you are the only person in the world who is intended to view this particular design, you need to empathize with the actual end-users: your customers. Only by viewing the work from your customers’ perspective will you be able to suggest changes that will make it better for them – which in turn will make the design more effective for you. Design is art with a purpose, so keep the ultimate goal of the work firmly in mind as you review it, and chances are it’ll be more effective.

What’s the black hole?

By this, I mean which single element within the design exerts the strongest pull on your eye? Is it the logo? The headline? The image? Once you’ve established this, consider whether this helps or harms the objective of the work as a whole. Do you want people to know who is communicating with them via this message, or is that a given? Do they need to take action (usually, yes, they do)? If so, what?

This doesn’t necessarily have to apply to one single item – there should be a clear hierarchy in the elements, with the most important attracting your eye more than the less important.

Ride the river

In keeping with the tip to empathize with your customer, try to watch yourself as you interact with this design, whether it’s reading a poster, looking through a website design, etc. Is there a natural progression in the information, or does it feel fragmented and disjointed? Is your eye able to easily scan the piece and retrieve the necessary information, or do you strain to concentrate?

A good design will have considered the needs of the audience, and structured the layout and information to enable the viewer to relax and be carried through the necessary information smoothly – almost like riding a river downstream. In an inner-tube. While the sun shines on your face. Ahhh…

A bad design makes you feel like you’re swimming upstream against a raging river, like salmon during mating season. Oh, and there are bears trying to catch you. Like this.

Trust your gut

I espouse this approach in my article Getting the Best out of Your Freelancers, but I’ll say it again: reviewing a piece of work can oftentimes be difficult, involving hours spent pondering over pro’s and cons, second-guessing and mind-changing. Solid decisions are frequently made in the blink of an eye, though – much like how your customers will when they see a piece of work for the first time. Therefore, when presented with a piece of work, take note of your gut reaction to it. Don’t block out other considerations, but don’t necessarily reject them outright, simply because they occurred to you in the first couple of seconds, either.

Is there a pattern?

No, I don’t mean checking for paisley (unless you’re into that kind of thing). What I mean is: humans are hard-wired for pattern recognition, and we spot them quickly and efficiently (sometimes even when they’re not really there – ever been cloud-watching?). Effective design creates a consistent and logical pattern – a language, if you will – which allows the user to become familiar with it over time, and therefore interact with it more efficiently. Example: everywhere on the web, you see certain words underlined and in blue – we all know they’re clickable links. Design, plus time and experience has taught us to have this expectation wherever we see them – a common visual language that needs no explanation.

Click here, then, to see this system completely break down.

Nothing happened, right? This is what happens when an inconsistent design is used – it’s not a link, just some blue, underlined text. Make sure the design isn’t setting up false expectations from your audience, which leads to confusion, frustration, and ultimately, missed opportunities.

Jason Amunwa is a marketing Macgyver, with experience creating innovative campaign strategies, designing creative executions across multiple channels, and most of the stuff that happens in-between, for brands big and small. He writes for marketing blog The Zest, loves talking tech and marketing strategy, and is suspicious of helicopters.