Do you know that every great designer was once a student? What makes a professional designer different from a beginner is his design understanding and smart habits of avoiding a few common mistakes. Remember, graphic design isn’t just about learning a few tools by following some video tutorials or joining any graphic design course. It’s about building a smart understanding of designing so that you can communicate your ideas to the audience easily.
We see many students fall into avoidable mistakes during their graphic design training. Whether you’re following free YouTube video tutorials or have enrolled in a course, it becomes highly crucial to know about these mistakes as they can easily slow down your growth. This is the reason we have brought this blog in order to uncover some common mistakes with tips to avoid them.
Let’s start the counting.
Common Mistakes Students Make while Learning Graphic Design
1. Focusing Only on Software, Not Design Principles
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One of the biggest myths between students is that learning design tools like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator or some AI tools is enough. But graphic designing doesn’t end at tools. The thing which makes you a designer is having a good knowledge of design skills and principles.
Real Industry Insight:
At the time of interview, recruiters neither check on your degree nor not how many tools you know. They check on whether you are good in core skills like typography, hierarchy, spacing, grids, color theory, proportion, etc. They check your overall design sense which never gets developed by working on a few bunch of tools. For becoming a true designer, start giving importance to design principles as well as design elements.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Give time on learning the rules which improves the quality of your design. Focus on balancing contrast, white space and alignment first.
- Do some research and check professional design portfolio websites, ads, as well as packaging. This helps you learn about how professional design gets formed.
- Tools like Photoshop or Illustrator are there just to assist you. They are not the creator, at the end the creative mind is yours.
2. Ignoring Typography
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Typography is another common area where students often slip up. They underestimate using the right typeface which weakens their designs. We see many students using font families like Comic Sans in a corporate poster, or using 4-5 different types of fonts in one banner. At this point, beginners often don’t understand the impact of what they are designing.
Real Industry Insight:
Recently in 2024 there is industry research done by AIGA. And according to the report over 70% of the feedback comes from those designers who are working on typography.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- There are multiple fonts and typography styles like serif, sans-serif, display, etc. As a designer you must know their difference and right usage.
- Use 2–3 fonts at max in your design. This makes your design look professional and consistent.
- Explore resources like Google Fonts and Dafont for finding unique font families. You can also use fontpair for getting ideas related to trending font pairing.
- Always follow typography trends that big brands are following.
3. Overloading Designs with Elements
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When a fresher starts designing then they often fill up every white space with elements like text, shapes, and images. This results in a cluttered layout that conveys a very messy and confusing message.
Real Industry Insight:
Professionals in the industry often say that “Good design is invisible”. For example, check the designs of brands like Nike and Apple. They always create simple, aesthetic and easy-to-understand designs.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Adding everything in the design looks overstuffed. Just use simple and less things to maintain breathing space.
- Many of you think that white space is useless. But it is the area which makes people focus on the main information.
- The best way to understand its value is to follow designs made by professional designers who work for big brands.
4. Copying Without Understanding
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Design students often look at sites like Behance and Pinterest for getting ideas for their own designs. The main problem that arrives here is that students often get stuck and stop exploring beyond it. They start treating design inspiration as a final destination for their project.
Real Industry Insight:
In the famous studios or agencies designers asked to make a design same as the existing template. But here’s the twist, designers need to show their own creativity in it. Now at this moment designers who are dependent on just copying designs get left behind. And the designers who have their own creative mindset grow up.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Try redesigning the famous posters and ads with a new set of colors and fonts. This way you will work on your innovative design skills.
- Focus on experimenting with different types of layouts and follow inspiration boards, but never replicate them directly.
5. Poor Understanding of Color
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In designing, colors affect the psychology of viewers. Like blue builds trust, red evokes urgency, and green feels natural. But the problem comes in when mostly design beginners start using a few common colors and gradients instead of proper study of color psychology. That makes their designs look dull and emotionally disconnected.
Real Industry Insight:
In order to take care of proper color balance, brands usually spend millions on testing. For example, Coca-Cola has red color; it is not a coincidence, but that red color is selected after a long testing level.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Make your basics strong and learn color fundamentals. Study color schemes that present the best harmony between different hues on the color wheel. Complementary, analogous, and monochromatic are among the most popular ones.
- Use tools like Adobe Color Wheel or Coolors. co, to get inspiration for making good color gradients.
- Observe projects of other professional designers. Try to follow up and understand what color scheme they follow a particular type of brand. For instance, if the brand is related to finance then generally we use blue. In healthcare, white and green are very common and in fashion and cosmetics we see purple and gold.
6. Designing Without a Target Audience
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Most beginners just start designing without having a perfect research on their target audience. For instance, you are designing a flyer with modern neon colors that the design is for a senior health camp. Here you get to see the mismatch between colors and targeted audience. Audience research is a part of design brief and beginners skip it very often.
Real Industry Insight:
When you work in professional agencies and studios you see that before starting any design, you have to take a brief from the client. This brief helps you to understand the target audience. If you do not take this step seriously and skip it, then your work, time, and efforts are useless.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Must check on the purpose of design, and after that start creating it.
- Always build personas of your client or audience.
- Take feedback from your mentors and friends before launching the design to the audience.
So, these were some of the main mistakes students make in graphic design with some tips to overcome them. Now if you really want to learn practically from the mentioned tips, then I recommend you to go with a structured program at our Graphic Design institute in Delhi. You can join our training online as well as we offer specialized online graphic design classes too.
Our programs cover a balanced training of design tools and design principles. We teach our students to follow proper stages that include planning, research, and consideration of true elements. For more information, feel free to contact our concerned person at +91 9911782350.