22 ways to tell your design doesn’t work

1. It doesn’t fulfill the brief at all. Case in point: The product is for a relaxing beach resort and you portray something that won’t sell the product at all, like Borat in a beach suit.

2. All your documents are saved as JPEGS at the lowest resolution.

3. Comic Sans is the prime font.

4. You mix and match too many fonts so people don’t know where to look.

5. You use so much embossing that the entire page has risen a whole millimeter.

6. You use underline, italics and bold all together.

7. The stock photos you choose are overly cheesy—unless you’re going for hipster irony, then all the power to you!

8. The kerning between your characters is so bad—everything is squeezed together so it’s barely readable.

9. The typesetting is all out of line.

10. Hanging words. EVERYWHERE.

11. You overused photoshop so much that in the end a weird hanging image of Grumpy Cat is in the background and you’re like “where’d that come from?”

12. You didn’t get anyone to proofread and as a result your apostrophes are all over the place.

13. Your grids don’t line up at all.

14. Your design is the exact replica of your client’s competitor.

15. Absolutely no breathing room or white space. Simple is better!

16. Overuse of drop shadows.

17. You use inch marks instead of proper quotes.

18. You used Paint’s spray paint tool heavily in the logo.

19. Your photography looks like it was taken in your basement with a disposable.

20. Clip art from Microsoft word is your logo.

21. Your mom was your critic.

22. Your page is way too overcrowded.

What are your biggest pet peeves? Tweet us with the hashtag #DynamiteDesign at @52pickupinc!