What are common mistakes beginners make with DIY graphic design?

Graphic design is often one of the services that business owners will take on themselves to avoid larger budgets. With the advent of template-based software like Canva, and generative AI, more people without training or experience are creating their own graphics.

While you won’t find any help from me for using AI, I have put together a list of the most common mistakes beginners make with DIY graphic design – and how to start correcting them!

Set yourself apart by following graphic design best practices, and make your work look more professional with the following advice:

What are the most frequent blunders in self-made graphic design projects?

I graduated with a diploma in computer graphic design almost 20 years ago. Print design was actually my intended major before I realized that I wanted to focus on Web instead.

Over the years a lot has changed, whether its image file types, software options, or new content functionality, it’s been important to stay up to date with design standards.

But as I’ve said before, we don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s easy (and often more efficient for us) to just “throw” something together and call it a day. But when we do this repetitively, it can often make our brand or content look amateurish.

Here are the top 10 common mistakes I see beginners make with their DIY graphic design efforts:

1. Mixing up web vs print standards
2. Not integrating your brand into your graphics
3. Using too many different fonts
4. Poor colour combinations and inaccessible contrast
5. Reusing the images you make for social media on your website
6. Stuffing too much text-based content in an image
7. Uploading print-resolution graphics to your website
8. Creating your brand logo with stock assets
9. Not having a proper license to use stock assets
10. Insufficient padding, white space, or margins

Mixing up web vs print standards

I mentioned earlier that I intended to become a print designer before deciding to focus on web design and development. Did you know that there is a difference between Print and Web graphics?

When we refer to Print design it is reflective of the graphic design that goes into logos (also called Brand Design), business cards, menus, billboards, signage, and anything else that requires printing your graphics.

When we refer to Web design it is reflective of the graphic design that goes into assets created for web-use only, the most obvious being website design. But, it also refers to graphics, images, and illustrations that are used for displaying on screens.

And it’s important to know the difference because your files will actually be larger/smaller depending on how they were created, and the colour models for these files are completely different.

When you are creating graphics for physical mediums, you need to implement the CMYK colour model.

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key/Black. It is known as a “subtractive” system because the pigments absorb light from ink. For example, cyan absorbs red light, magenta absorbs green light, yellow absorbs blue light, and black is the key because it absorbs all colors of light.

When you buy printer ink, these are delivered in these (4) colours and mixed to create the desired colour on paper.

RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue – the primary colours of light, and is considered an “additive” system. These three colours can be combined to create a wide spectrum on electronic displays.

Screens are made up of pixels, tiny little squares that have even tinier lights. RGB is delivered by an intensity scale from 0 to 255, which tells the pixels what colour and intensity to use on the display.

When you want white displayed on screen, your RGB will mix all three at 255. And when you want black displayed on screen, your RGB will mix all three at 0. Every combination in between can create millions of possible colors.

Vistaprint provides a great article that breaks this all down in more detail, including a visual representation of the two colour modes.

So what happens when you mix these up? Skip to mistake #7 Uploading print-resolution graphics to your website.

Not integrating your brand into your graphics

The mistake of not integrating your brand into your graphics usually occurs when you haven’t had a brand strategy put together before you start creating content for your business. Without one you don’t have a guide to follow.

I’ve already discussed why a brand strategy is so important for a business, but because I also see business owners with professional logos, brand colors, and typography making this mistake, I feel it’s worth talking about.

I think a lot of this happens when DIYers use templated graphics (think Canva) but don’t change anything about it other than swapping images and text.

For example, I’ve seen graphics regularly shared to social media by business owners, where each update uses different fonts or colour palettes in various images. If you open Canva, search templates, find one you like but don’t change these settings, you lose your entire brand effort in the process.

Ideally, you should be sticking within your brand’s colour palette, and using the same fonts that you use on your business card, brochure, and website. This continuation of your brand throughout all your materials makes your business feel more professional, seamless, and thoughtful.

When you don’t do this, it really does look like you picked something previously made and just replaced your text with what was originally there.

If you are using Canva professionally, you should make use of their Brand Kit. Here you can:

• Upload brand guidelines and standards to stay consistent with the creation of each asset.
• Upload your logo(s) – especially important if your brand package includes varied logos that have specific use cases.
• Enter your brand colour palette so that you can easily select or swap colours out.
• Set the font families for titles, subtitles, headings, subheadings, body, etc. making them easier to select or swap out.
• Provide a brand voice to remind you how you want to come across to your audience.
• Upload photos, icons, and graphical brand assets that you reuse in your work (like your headshot or background patterns) including creating guidelines for what NOT to use. For example, I have a rule that any of my colour contrasts must pass accessibility standards.

You really don’t need to use Canva to create your brand guidelines, they’ve just created a section to do so. Simply use this list to create a repository of your own where you can easily access it while working on your content.

Once you have a brand strategy in place, it’s much easier to follow guidelines that will in turn make your graphics feel more thought-out, deliberate, and geared towards your audience.

🔍 Looking for more incentive to build a brand strategy? Learn how rebranding my business supported me in more ways than graphic design decisions.

Using too many different fonts

There are mistakes to avoid when choosing fonts for DIY branding projects. While I pointed this out already, I’m going to double down on the importance of being strategic with your font choices.

There is such a thing known as Font Psychology, similar to the mood or feeling that certain colours give off. If you’ve had a professional brand made for you, your graphic designer may have asked you what vibe you want to give your audience or what your brand voice is long before they start designing. 

By following a standard in your work across all mediums, you’re creating an impact and shaping the emotions you’re hoping to achieve through the solutions your business provides.

So not only should you be strategic with the few font families you select, you need to ensure you’re reusing them in all your brand assets, graphics, and content.

When you select multiple fonts, like colours, these variances need to pair well with each other. 2-3 different fonts are enough for a business. Once you start using too many or entirely different ones in various graphics, you start losing trust and influence because it doesn’t feel like your brand is cohesive and thoughtful.

You should also be aware that font selection also impacts readability. Choosing a whimsical script font that is difficult to read, for example, can create barriers to usability and user-understanding.

🔍 Looking for more font selection tips? Learn more about selecting your font families and typography.

Poor colour combinations and inaccessible contrast

I’ve mentioned accessibility because I feel it’s very important for each and every one of us to consider when we publish content. And while it’s always been important, sadly it didn’t start getting the attention it deserved until laws were implemented to follow.

Just because you can read the combination of your text colour over your background colour doesn’t mean everyone else can. 

Just because you initially selected a non-accessible colour contrast in your original brand guidelines or storefront location doesn’t mean you should continue doing so on your website or print materials.

So, what can you do? You can fix color issues in DIY graphic design projects by starting with an online colour contrast checker!

Tools like the one I’ve linked from Accessible Web will give you fields to enter the HEX codes of your colour choices (or an eyedropper tool) for both your background and foreground. Then, it will show you the contrast ratio and whether or not it passes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance.

My old brand colours did not comply with accessibility standards and is one of the reasons why during my rebrand I requested an accessible colour palette. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use a colour that you like, it just means that you need to be mindful of HOW you use it.

🔍 Looking for more accessibility tips? Learn more about common accessibility mistakes, and why I don’t recommend using an accessibility overlay widget on your website.

Reusing the images you make for social media on your website

Most of the images you use on your social media profiles have specific dimensions to account for their purpose and placement: profile avatar, cover photo, grid, or carousel, etc.

Your website won’t necessarily reflect these same dimensions, and containers for your featured image in blog posts, or a column image in a page layout will likely require specific dimensions of their own.

And there’s more…

Stuffing too much text-based content in an image

This advice isn’t limited to reusing Instagram images, although it’s the common culprit. 

Because Instagram is a graphic-based application a lot of accounts will post images with text embedded in the graphic. Often they’ll reiterate this information in more detail within the image description, but it’s rare that when these images are reused elsewhere that the text-based description is included.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that can read embedded text in photos, scanned documents, and other graphics. However a lot of users don’t use this, and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) suggests that any display text that is meant to be read should be included as on-page text.

This is because on-page text can be resized and modified by the user, whereas embedded text in images cannot.

Furthermore, if search engine optimization (SEO) is part of your marketing strategy you shouldn’t include important content only within graphics. While the advent of OCR is used by some search engines it shouldn’t be depended on for your prominent content.

Uploading print-resolution graphics to your website

Saving out images from somewhere like Canva, a stock photo database, or your own camera may also give you print-ready resolutions if you don’t specify otherwise. 

This means that your downloaded image is large enough in DPI and dimensions to be of high quality when printed. Using a photograph for print would require a minimum of 300dpi and can have dimensions as large as 4800 x 6000 pixels or greater.

Web resolutions can be much smaller, because we don’t need the same quality as print. And uploading print-ready images will use up more space on your website, and take more time to load. 

On the web you really only need to upload a graphic to the maximum display settings it will have when seen on screen. For example, the featured images on my blog posts are displayed at 1200px x 800px on desktop monitors, while they display as only 450px x 300px on mobile. 

If you’re using different images depending on screen size you’ll size them accordingly, but a lot of CMS platforms will resize as needed, which means you’d want to upload the largest size your image needs to be without losing quality.

For example, if I uploaded a featured image that was only 450px x 300px, it would look fine on mobile, but lose quality and gain pixelation when viewed on desktop.

Saving out and uploading the right image can be the difference between a file that is megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) in size, versus one that is only kilobytes (KB).

🔍 Looking for more image optimization tips? Learn more about editing images for web and social media.

Creating your brand logo with stock assets

What are the pitfalls to avoid when creating logos at home? Every brand designer will tell you not to use stock or templates, and I’m inclined to agree. Sure, it compliments the idea you should hire a professional designer, but it’s also for legal reasons, brand uniqueness, and scalability of the file itself.

If you grab a logo or icon off of stock or templates, it’s not really yours. A lot of people who are throwing material together for their business may think, “Meh. It’s only on my website and social media profiles – it doesn’t matter, and I like what I see.”

The truth is, these might be good as a starting point for social media or supplementary graphics, but due to not having exclusive ownership you wouldn’t want this as your professional brand logo as you couldn’t apply a copyright.

Non-exclusive ownership means that anyone else could be using the same logo. You may think that the likelihood of your audience seeing two instances of the same logo is low, but it’s not unheard of. 

You also have no control over the people or organizations that may be using a similar identity and what they say or do, which could lead you to wanting to separate yourself. Which means having to recreate anything you did with that logo. Wah wah.

Templates can also restrict the scalability and usability of your logo file.

Professional brand packages typically include more than one version of your logo. This is so that you have a logo better suited to your website, versus a logo better suited to your letterhead, versus a logo that is small enough for an avatar or profile image. You get the idea.

I have several versions of my logo: Primary, Secondaries, Wordmarks, and Brandmarks, which makes it so much easier to implement in different mediums, and keep a cohesive brand.

🔍 Looking for more logo tips? Learn more about the benefits of having more than one logo type.

Not having a proper license to use stock assets

Similarly to grabbing logos off of templates and not retaining a copyright, stock photos and other graphical assets follow the same reasoning.

If you want a photo that nobody else can use, you’ll need to take it yourself or hire a photographer. Even purchasing a license through a premium service like iStock or Adobe doesn’t remove the file for others to purchase access too, you may just get more versatility in how you can use it.

It’s gotten better in recent years, but the amount of people who would google images and simply right-click + save for their own usage was mind-boggling. 

“If you find out – from Canva or somewhere else – that there’s a claim of infringement of another’s right for which Canva might be liable, you have to stop using the Content immediately, at your own expense. This applies whether the claim is threatened, potential or actual.” – Canva Content License Agreement Policy

Most wouldn’t copy and paste text from another website to use on their own, so why would images be any different?

You should read the licensing information on each website or service you use that gives you access to stock photos. Even free stock images that you download from sites like Unsplash or Pexels have licensing rules.

The truth is that I know multiple individuals who were served with cease and desist orders when they were found using an image that they shouldn’t be.

Just remove that stress from the equation altogether and be self-aware of what you’re doing.

Insufficient padding, white space, or margins

My last piece of advice when making your graphics is to be mindful of the areas of your design that you’re NOT using. 

White space is the negative space in a design that sits in between and around your content.

This white space isn’t wasted. It improves your overall design by making important content stand out visually, suggesting what the viewer should focus on. 

It also helps with readability, comprehension, and not overwhelming the viewer by making too much content fit into a specific area. If you feel like any of your designs are overwhelming and “busy”, chances are that you could use more white space.

Layout designers will use what we call ‘padding’ or ‘margins’ to create consistent gaps between content. A margin refers to the spacing around an element, while padding refers to the spacing within an element. 

For example, when you visit a website the text doesn’t usually sit nestled up to the edge of your screen. There is a bit of “breathing room” applied to either side of the page to supply some spacing so that everything is easier to consume.

If you think this is an issue in your graphics, you’re likely trying to fit too much content within your image. Prioritize the most important information first, and remove the unnecessary elements.

Remember, in most cases you have other elements that coincide with your image where you can append additional information. On your website you have text-based content, and on most social media you have description areas!

Are there tutorials that address common DIY graphic design challenges?

Between unchanged templates, too many different font or colour assets, and using incorrect images on websites, there are several general mistakes to avoid when doing your own graphic design projects. 

But what if you need advice that is tailored to you and the software you use? Consider a personal tutorial to address common DIY graphic design challenges and identify design errors in your own marketing materials.