Each year, everyone at KWSM is invited to participate in the Mentorship Program to learn from another team member and grow our skillset. This year, I was paired with Junior Content Creator Miranda Vazquez to teach Design.
Coming into the Mentorship Program, Miranda had some goals to improve her knowledge around the principles of design to make her clients’ social media graphics even better. As a Web Designer at KWSM for the last three years, my goal was to increase her confidence in her graphic design skills by doing a deep dive into design fundamentals and growing her familiarity with tools she uses on a daily basis to make those designs.
Over the course of twelve weeks, we spent the majority of our time together pouring over these main design principles:
Whitespace
Whitespace, while not always literally white, refers to any space that is left open or empty in a design. It is so easy as a designer to want to fill up the available space with creative and interesting elements, but using too many elements too close together makes a design feel cluttered and the focal point of the design gets lost.
Whitespace is intentionally empty space that provides “breathing room” for all the design’s elements, reducing the feeling of clutter, establishing clear boundaries between sections, and making information easier to digest.
Hierarchy
Another way to make a design easy on the eyes is by creating hierarchy, which can be done in a few different ways. Hierarchy creates contrast between elements in a design so that sections are clearly defined, visually effortless to digest, and the focal point is instantly obvious.
Designers can create hierarchy by changing the size, color, alignment, or contrast of important elements, making them stand out from everything else in the design. For example, the most important headline in a text-based design should be the largest or brightest in color, while the supporting information that expands on that headline should be smaller in comparison. This visually guides someone’s eyes to the most important information rather than making them struggle to find what is most important buried somewhere in the design.
Typography
Typography refers to the styling of text in design including font-style, size, appearance, and more. How text is displayed alters the entire feel of a design. Good use of typography can reinforce the tone of the text and make everything easier to read or create dissonance between graphic elements and become distracting when chosen poorly. Designs can look traditional, fancy, casual, juvenile, modern, or trendy just by adjusting typography.
Results After Learning About Design Fundamentals
As we watched videos and read about these design fundamentals, Miranda was putting them into practice by creating social media graphics for her clients each week. We then reviewed the new graphics together and made tweaks until each one was just right. By the end of our 12 weeks together, Miranda had created a bank of over twenty social media templates for her content creation that follow design best-practices, including Instagram posts and Reel cover photos, blog graphics, LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, and more.
This was a great opportunity to revisit some fundamental design principles and flex the leadership skills I learned from KWSM’s Leadership Program last year. I am so grateful that KWSM provides a structure for us to learn from each other. The mentorship program is a perfect example of KWSM’s emphasis on a growth mindset, and this collaboration with our teammates not only strengthens the team as a whole, but our individual skill sets as well.
Are you interested in joining the KWSM Team?
If you are passionate about digital marketing and want to join a company where collaboration and continued professional development opportunities are available and encouraged, view open roles at KWSM!
