Reasons why your banner design sucks

A banner is a lot like a business card. For people who do not know your business, it is their very first impression they will have. If your banner is ugly and an eyesore, they will not click on it. Even worse, they may associate your business with a degree of unprofessionalism. Nobody wants to be branded and amateur, as it can become a stigma hard to overcome. Yet, when you do you own graphic design, you are putting yourself at risk of just that. It is always important to overcome a huge temptation. Owning a few graphic design programs does not mean you know how to use them. Plus, any money saved by designing your own banner could be lost fairly easily. If you are not attracting visitors to your website, you are losing money. There are reasons why your banner design sucks. These reasons are also very easy to spot.

You have used too many different types of fonts. Lettering can be very tricky, and using many too many styles will cause clutter. A banner advertisement is a very small amount of internet real estate, and you cannot cram too much into it. The result will look disorganized and haphazard.

This is also compounded by the exact fonts you use. Sometimes, fancy scripts and specialty typefaces can be hard to read. A scratchy, bloody goth font is hard to look at by itself, and once you place a swirly cursive next to it, it just draws attention to both being bad picks. Once you pack three or four of these fonts together, the viewer's eye becomes strained.

Even if you are using lettering correctly, it will still look amatuerish if everything is off-center. A lot of unprofessional design looks rushed. Off-center font placement, or even unaligned images, will also make the banner look terrible. This can be as bad used incorrectly formatted images that appear grainy and out of place.

Bad design is eye catching for all the wrong reasons. As stated earlier, it is best to think of a banner like a business card. Badly designed business cards are looked at once and then are tossed into the garbage. They do not make it into a person's contact list. When you use sloppy banner design, essentially the same thing happens in spirit. Only, a web surfer goes on their way, and your banner has done nothing to direct visitors to your site.
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