Color
Choosing the right color palette is crucial for successful visual communication. Color evokes emotions and sets the tone for your message, not to mention catching eyes and making a strong first impression.
Understanding the core four types of color combinations is essential for any designer. These combinations play a fundamental role in color theory and provide a starting point for your design journey.
But how do you choose the right colors? Color, and the emotions they evoke, help us to gain an understanding of what we’re feeling based on whatever we’re looking at. That is why choosing the correct color palette for your project is an essential step in making any design successful.
With Adobe Express, you can search for color palettes under the Colors tab using a keyword to find palettes that match your ideal theme. There are countless color possibilities to try when creating your visual communication project.
Typography
Pick a type — or two! Simplicity is key when it comes to text. Limit your use of different type families and ensure they are consistent with your branding. Using more than one typeface is acceptable, but make sure they offer visual contrast. Keep different sizes and styles to a minimum, ensuring a unified and accessible design.
For example, you might pair a serif font (a font with “tails,” like Times New Roman) with a sans serif font (a font without “tails,” like Arial), but not two serif fonts together. Also, limit the use of different sizes and styles to what is really necessary. Practicing restraint here will help your design feel more streamlined.
Beyond words: harnessing infographics and data visualization
Data visualization is a powerful tool for representing complex information with simplicity. It highlights trends, growth, and changes in data, making it easier for readers to connect with valuable insights.
Making use of fundamental tools like charts, indicators, and infographics, data visualization simplifies the stories told by today’s massive datasets, helping teams to identify connections and relationships between data, and enabling better business decisions and more meaningful strategy development.
An infographic allows others to visualize your complex data story and get your point across. They typically feature a concise collection of smaller data visualizations, like charts and graphs, as well as eye-grabbing text, icons, imagery, and additional graphics. Together, they aid in presenting information in visually inviting ways that connect with readers. Infographics can be used across devices and platforms, including PDFs, printouts, social posts, and more.
The best infographic designs represent data, instructions, routines, or systems, while keeping text to a minimum. They can be a fun visualization of a single data point supporting a larger story, or an entire page that uses distinct visuals to share multiple pieces of information about one core topic. When sketching out yours, focus on:
- Developing a visual hierarchy to emphasize the most important points.
- Establishing the flow of information to guide the reader through the infographic.
- Utilizing icon sets to connect images relevant to your topic with the data you wish to convey.
Think about the story you’d like to tell, and what data you’d need to collect to support that story. For example, if you’re trying to show growth in a brand’s social media presence, look for statistics on audience and engagement growth to determine and convey a trend.
Showcasing data through graphs, charts, and visual narratives
Charts are a versatile tool for conveying data, whether you're presenting percentages, growth, or trends.
Pie charts, line charts, and bar charts can work together to create a comprehensive data visualization that helps convey your message effectively. They are a helpful way to represent analysis of data points like percentages, growth, or trends. Pie, line, and bar charts can work separately or together in an infographic to create a data visualization that creates understanding and consensus around research, metrics, ideas, and trends.
