Design to Sell

Design as Balance

As the preceding overview of the six criteria illustrates, effective design is often more a result of balance than creative self-expression or design excess.

Your designs will improve to the extent that they are based on goals, readership, message, competition, distribution, and resources. A failure to address these issues leads to subjective, “creative” design unrelated to the tasks that the marketing message must achieve. Likewise, placing too much emphasis on some while failing to fully acknowledge others also leads to designs that fail to achieve their goals.

The primacy of planning and balance should come as good news to those who have always considered design as purely a creative or an intuitive task. Design, in terms ...