by Ceci Ellis
Most of the design mistakes I see small businesses make come from the same place: they’re trying to make everything look interesting. It’s a natural instinct, and it’s usually what gets in the way.
The biggest one is a lack of cohesion. Somewhere along the way, someone decides it would be fun to use three, four, or five different fonts, each in its own color, and none of those colors were chosen to go together. Each choice makes sense on its own. Together they look like a ransom note. That’s actually a real design term, the “Ransom note effect” named for the old trick of cutting letters out of different newspapers and magazines so the writer’s handwriting couldn’t be traced.
A good design feels like it was made by one person with one idea. Pick two fonts at most, often a serif and a non-serifed font, choose a small palette, and use them the same way everywhere, on your website, your cards, your signs, and your social posts. That repetition is what makes a brand feel cohesive.
The second mistake is filling every inch of space. People hate empty space, so they add another line of text, another badge, another photo. But blank space does real work. It gives the eye somewhere to rest and tells people what to look at first. Sometimes what you don’t say is just as important as what you do say, and the same goes for what you don’t put on the page. If everything on a flyer is shouting, nothing is heard.
The third mistake costs the most money: not proofing. Proof your design, then proof it again, then hand it to someone else to proof. A typo on a website is a quick fix. A typo on printed materials is a permanent reminder. I know this firsthand. Fresh out of school, I misspelled my own name on 500 posters. My own name! I didn’t notice until we got them back from the printer, and I was mortified. The problem is that after you’ve looked at a design a hundred times, your eyes see what you expect to see, not what’s actually there. That’s why a fresh pair of eyes matters, and why you should double-check every line before it goes to the printer.
And now the part where you’ll roll your eyes, because I’m a designer: my advice is to hire a professional for the things that represent your business, meaning your logo, your website, your brochures, and your corporate materials. I mean it honestly, though, not as a sales pitch. Customers judge a business within seconds, and they usually can tell when the design was thrown together, whether that was by a well-meaning owner or by an AI tool that produced something generic. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It does have to look like someone cared.
If you can’t hire anyone right now, that’s okay. Use two fonts, keep your colors consistent, leave room to breathe, and proof everything several times. Do those four things and you’ll be ahead of most of the competition.
Good design isn’t about adding more. It’s about making sure every choice matters.
