How to spot an amateur graphic designer
| Posted in Hot design topics, Latest Post | Posted on 18-11-2009
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How to spot an amateur designer
this is an example of that as well…
Graphic designers who feel Helvetica is bad font or shouldn’t be used; Fact is Helvetica is used by 75% of American businesses and mostly in the form of logo design. If the font Helvetica is not one of greatest fonts in the world than how come it’s used for practically everything. Professional graphic designers know that Helvetica is the crème de la crème of fonts for designers. Amateur designers focus on straying from what works to what’s odd or different.
A professional designer knows that recognition is key; you should be able to recognize a brand from miles away. An amateur designer focuses on busy typography design rather than a clear concise message. Bad graphic designers have no concept of simplicity or balance; placing & spacing are completely inappropriate and confuses the audience rather than provokes them. Designers who use color schemes that do not go together or unify the design they are trying to convey.
For instance using red, purple, yellow, and neon green as the basis for their color foundation. Not having a focal point or not having the right focal point. For instance business cards for a car repair shop should not have a huge image of a car and really small logo and type.
The focal point should be your logo your brand not some random image. An amateur graphic designer copies other designers work instead of creating his or her own unique style. A lot of graphic designers completely rip off something they seen somewhere else and go and display a recreated copy of that design, and relish in the moment, but when asked to design something unique they lack the skills required to do so. Graphic Designers who rip a template theme off as their own unique design and claim to have designed it themselves. They swap out the logo and credits and claim the site as their design. This is the worst type of amateur designer because they are also a fraud. There portfolio and there web sites consist of rips from some of the most major designers.
These designers are lazy they take absolutely no pride in originality. You can tell a bad designer by his logo, most bad designers use a basic font and just type out their logo name. An amateur graphic designer will use the default shapes and brushes in Photoshop to create their logo, why would a designer want to use a default shape? Everyone will know what it is. and more importantly it does not in any way uniquely brand your company. It is a mere sign of an amateur graphic designer at work.
Bad or amateur designers use Dreamweaver for everything, good designers use dream weaver just for visualization. Professional designers hand code their work, because a professional graphic or web designer knows programs can bloat the code or add extra code that will make your website lag. Have you ever heard the saying do it right the first time? Writing your own code prevents a lot of common bugs and or site errors for designers.
A Professional Graphic Or web designer uses a font manager and typically has between 25,000 fonts to 250,000 fonts if not more whereas an amateur designer uses the basic fonts on his computer or free fonts he finds on the internet. An amateur designer will repeat the same design over and over again using the same color scheme or concept never straying, an example would be a song writer or artist who made a new album but all the songs sound almost the same. A graphic Designer will create art that is supposed to be totally separate pieces but they all look the same as if they were part of the same design campaign. This is referred to as a Rusty designer.
[…] out in these articles): amateur signs: 10 Common Mistakes In Logo Design — Smashing Magazine How to spot an amateur graphic designer | i also came across this post, it’s slightly off topic, but definitely funny: Bad Logos — When […]
hope you enjoy the post, just wanted to add also to this list which was a mere oversight, the inability to crave constructive critisim is probably the number one tell tale sign of an amateur designer.
When you ask your husband does your ass look good in those pants, he probably lies and says yes, because he knows you won’t accept the truth in the first place.
This is the same for amatuer designers, if you tell them thier site sucks they will deny it and claim your jealous of thier success which happens to be none never the less.
Also a designer who is a bad speller or not good at english or punctuation does not make him or her a bad designer. Design has nothing to do with grammer and spelling. Grammer and spelling can be editited where a bad designer is just not fixable.
An amateur designer would feel that his perfect english and spelling make up for his lack of design however truly one has nothing to do with the other.