Sunday, August 22, 2010

Formatting Mistakes to Avoid in Postcard Design



While the text itself is kind of secondary to the image in postcard printing, the formatting of that text is crucial for the overall look of the postcard design. Even with postcard templates, you won't be able to make your designs perfect if you don't know how to handle and format your text properly. So, if you are worried about committing formatting mistakes in your postcard design, I suggest you read through the list below. These are the common formatting mistakes that you should avoid when designing color postcards. Hopefully by knowing about these mistakes, you should be able to format your text in the right way for proper postcard printing.

• Too much typeface variation - The first thing that you should watch out for in formatting is the variation of typefaces in your text. Many newcomers in postcard design get too excited with the use of the bold, italic and underline effects. These formatting options are good in their own right, but when used a lot and in all places in the text, this begins to be a formatting problem that can make the postcard design look bad. So make sure you minimize your use of typefaces. Use them only for important text, and not on the whole postcard document.

• Too much size variation - Another formatting mistake that postcard designers tend to do is to use too many different sized fonts. Some of the text might be horrendously big, while others are minutely small. When put together with other text of different size variations, this results in a very messy and not so appealing custom postcard design. That is why it is important to lessen your font sizes. Two or three set standard font sizes should be good enough for any postcard design. These will help you make your custom postcards look more professional.

• Off concept font styles - It is also a big and common mistake for people to use "off concept font styles". These are the font styles that are not necessarily good for the theme of the design, but they do look good unto themselves. Many beginners actually commit this mistake, simply because they are excited and hyped up to use that cool font style they saw from the Internet. While it is good to foster some creativity and originality, if the font style is really off the main concept of the design, it is only logical for the design to go bad.

The trick here to avoid going "off concept" in postcard font styles is to first choose a simple headline sans serif font as a placeholder. Typically it is best to use these simpler headline font styles as a base. Now, you should then try out the different styles of fonts you want to use and then compare it with that simpler font. Believe me, in a lot of cases, designers will eventually use the simpler font for their postcard designs, simply because it looks cleaner and is easier to understand. So always try to check to see if your font styles look great.

• Text clumping - Another big formatting mistake that you should avoid is text clumping. This is the effect of having all your text content clumped into just one side of the postcard without having a balancing element to come with it (such as a group of text or an image). When your text content for postcards are clumped like that, the postcard won't look as balanced and as clean as it normally should. This may lead to bad postcard designs that we should definitely avoid. So next time, always try to balance your text with an equal element on its opposite side.

• Overly aligned text - Finally, many designers often commit the mistake of overly aligning their text inside a postcard design. While alignment of text is a good practice for word processors, for designers text should be more fluid so that it can match the design, even if there are curves and swirls. So you should not always be rigid with the alignment of text. If your text content follow a diagonal or curved line for a better design effect, by all means try to use that to your advantage.

Now you know the things to avoid in postcard printing and design. Hopefully you should be able to use your knowledge to lessen the formatting mistakes in your postcard printing. Good Luck!












Michelle Abreu has been writing articles online for about 2 years now in a printing company. You can also check out this website for more information about postcard printing and on how to make the right design for your postcard templates.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michelle_Abreu


 

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