Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Moni Talks Tech. And today we are gonna dive a tiny bit into the design aspect of things because I am this weird fucking unicorn that can do a few different things. And one of them is also designing things because I come from multiple backgrounds, as I've mentioned previously in the previous episodes. If you wanna figure that out, you can come back to one of the very first ones or explain a bit about who I am and what I'm doing. But in essence, I am this weird combination of design and tech and, web design related things.
So I know a few things about what makes things look good as well. And today I'm gonna talk a bit about that because sometimes with just a few things and a few tips that you can look at, designs will immediately look way better than what you probably created yourself.
So let's dive right into tip number one. Contrast if somebody has created your brand colors for you already, that's great. If nobody has done that yet and you're winging it, then be aware that not everything works well together. And an important thing about this is contrast. Contrast is a way to make things be more obvious, like make call to actions more obvious. For example, if you have two different colors that aren't very contrast-full, if that's a proper word, , then it makes it difficult for people to see and acknowledge what the call to action actually is.
That means picking a call to action color that really stands out from everything else that's going on on the page. But it also means that the way you set up your designs, if your text is not contrasting enough from the background off of it, it will be not as well readable. And then people will not engage with your content on social media. For example, if you have social media graphics that are very dark and then your text is barely readable on them, then people just won't stick to them and won't read them because it's effort and you want them to pay attention to it. So it means you need to make it easy and also accessible. We're also talking about people who might have difficulty seeing things properly or are colorblind. So, and we should be including everyone in the content that we create as good as possible.
That means using alt descriptions in images and also making sure that that the content we put out there is good and easily readable for people. There are multiple tools out there that give you like an accessibility score. If you wanna check the contrast of things, I'll put those in the show notes for you to check. And this is just one way to improve your design and also to include everybody that is also looking at it on social media or elsewhere on the internet.
Tip Number two, there are a lot of fonts out there, but that doesn't mean you need to try every single one on the same fucking design. Please do not merge a lot of different fancy fonts with each other. It will not look professional. You will not portray what you want to portray, which is you are the expert in your field and you know what you're talking about.
You don't want your social media posts, your website to look like a children's birthday party invitation unless that's your brand and that's what you wanna go with, then please go for it. But balance is still key. You can have a fun brand, you can have a, a playful brand without having to use 20 different fonts to go with it. So what does that mean? You can easily use a font that's very eye-catching and and very special and fun and and does a lot like, script font or whatever, but don't pair a lot of the same type of fonts with each other. You don't need three different script fonts and you don't need three different san serrif fonts. Those are the ones with the tiny little feet on the Rs and things. And it's not making you stand out more just because you use more fonts.
That's not how it rolls. Make a decision, choose something that fits for you that goes well together. Have one that's fancy, one that's simple and one that could be somewhere in the middle of it, but don't overexert with a lot of different fonts and don't go with more than three different kinds and especially I'm just saying three because I would assume one is more of a highlight font but not one that you regularly use. So stick to two and ideally maybe have a third one as a highlight. But that's really enough. And please, for the love of all that is holy to you and for the things that you love and whatever and you really care for in your life, please do not separate and increase the letter spacing on script fonts. Those are the fonts that if you have a handwriting and you would write something and all the letters touch together, that's kind kind of what a script fund is.
I'm pretty sure you know what I mean when when I say script font, but please don't separate the letter spacing. Don't separate these letters from each other and increase the letter spacing on these funds. These fonts are meant to touch each other and if they don't touch each other, it's like you are separating a long lost couple that hasn't seen each other for years and they try really hard to reach out and just to hold hands and you are making it impossible. And it it, this is the single biggest aside from a couple of other things, but it's one of the biggest pet peeves for l I think all designers out there. And it doesn't make you look professional and you, I know you might not see that and you might come across a lot of things and you won't see that, but there are t-shirts being sold with script font that is not touching and you don't wanna be one of those people.
Please make sure if you use script fonts that they touch each other properly, that it looks like it's written and it looks like everything belongs together. It's also not great if you merged them too close together that you can see the start in the beginning of the letter. They should stay together in a way that looks as if it's a word written in one go in essence, or however many letters are fitting and touching, basically. They're obviously always the old ones out like a T or an I, they could be separate, but some, most of the time the middle letters, they do touch each other and you want them to touch each other. So do not increase the letter spacing for these fonts.
Tip number three is white space. What does white space mean? So if you look at your canvas, just because your canvas has a certain size doesn't mean that you need to package full with information.
Sometimes a little bit of white space that means room for the text or whatever you put on there on these sides to breathe will make it a look more professional. And you can play with the white space because the way you position your text or your items on your designs also impacts how people see it and when people see it and when they pay attention to a certain thing. So by giving something a bit more room, people's eyes tend to navigate to certain things and therefore the attention also goes to something specific in comparison to when you pack everything together in one space and there is not a lot of room. So you can basically create something really nice in combination with contrast and white space, like have big red for an example, red call to action buttons that like stand alone and are really apparent in your design that is not cramped between two massive blocks of text where you just then despite the red button, look over what's going on. So just use a bit more wide space, give it things, give it air to breathe for it to just be easier on the eye for people. And I promise it will also make your designs look more professional.
Tip number four is consistency. I know you want your designs and the things you offer to stand out on wherever you are gonna publish it. Let's say social media or your website. You want this to be different than other things. And especially when you are offering multiple different kind of programs or courses or have a lot of launches and challenges, you want them to be distinguishable, right? I totally understand that. But that doesn't mean you can't just go willynilly around and throwing your designs together like there is no plan behind it because people need to recognize that it comes from you. And that is not just because you put your picture on it.
People wanna recognize your content because of your brand, because of the colors that you use, because of the fonts that you use. You will become recognisable based on all of that. So if you just change all of that up every time, people have a hard time recognising you for you. So this is why there are a lot of very talented people out there creating incredible brand guides for you and a brand for you in general to have everything work together to have not only how you roll in business, but also how your business looks. This is all very thoroughly created by people that are very, very skilled and very talented. And it is really essential that you also stick to it because it's part of you and part of your brand. And it's something that will help people recognize you at the same time.
And that doesn't mean that you can't switch things up occasionally or add something to it or to make something look different, but at the core it should still be recognisable for the outside and for people so that they know this content belongs to you and not to somebody else.
And tip number five might not be really a tip, but I just want to add that here so you can have a bit of help with what you're creating because you don't need to start fresh with all your designs all the time if you use Canva, which is very common now in the online business space. And a lot of people use it. And even though really professional graphic designers hate the living daylight out of it for ease, Canva is really simple and for the things a lot of people use, Canva is good enough. It's not a professional design tool and a lot of things that you want from it, it can't do.
But in the last six years since I'm in business, it has really grown a lot, a whole lot and it just makes creating social media graphics and other kind of graphics that are all used for on that are all for online use. It just makes it really easy to create. So you can just go ahead and create graphics with that. And they also have a bunch of templates that you can have a look at and then they're all nicely designed. So you can choose one and then adjust according to, according to your design, to your colors and add your font to it and see if it still looks nice. And I'm not saying this to then be all like, yeah, whatever, everybody has the same thing. But I'm saying this just for ease because sometimes time is of the essence and money is of the essence and you need to or want to crank a lot of content out and not everything can be perfect and sometimes it's just about creating something quickly and you can always use the templates in Canva for that to make your life just really, really way easier than it has to be.
You don't always need to start from scratch. So those were my five tips on how you can make your designs look a bit more professional. And if you have any more questions, you can just hit me up on Instagram at MoniRocksYourSocks, or message me through my website at monirocksyoursocks.com. I would be happy to hear from you and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week and see you next week for another amazing Moni Talks Tech episode or design or whatever else I want to have. Have a rant about . See you next week.