What YOU should know about design

     As our culture heavily leans towards individualization and "who are you", there's so much opportunity to customize, decorate, and design your personal spaces. Whether this is the clothes you wear, your facebook cover photo, your twit pic, your tumblr layout, a tattoo, the bumper stickers on your car, or personal living spaces like your office or the living room. Basically, everyone has the opportunity to be a designer, or at least look like they have good taste and style.
     Here's a couple things you should keep in mind as you visualize your public image (This might end up being a list of don'ts...):

1) Flow.

Don't use 5 odd matching colors that are your personal favorites. Make sure you have a theme, whether that's in pattern, color, or texture. It's pleasing to the eye to see continuity. Ever hear the rule not to use more than two fonts? That applies here. (I sometimes I use three... Header font, subheader font, and body text font)

          

2) Quality.

It's really easy to refine your Google search to find high quality images.

No one wants to see pixelated or stretched images anywhere. For facebook cover photos, the size of your image should be at least 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall.

3) Don't use default fonts.

The obvious, stay away from papyrus and comic sans. But really, any font that's overused and can be selected from a dropdown list is a no-no.
Courier, Times, Impact, Handwriting-Dakota, Arial, Lucida, etc... It's all a bit 2005 and way over-done.

Try googling some good fonts you can install on your computer or mac. Lost Type Co is the graphic designer's go-to, but even those fonts are wearing on me.

Here's a couple links to check out:
http://pinterest.com/missjillian/great-fonts/
http://asubtlerevelry.com/25-great-fonts-for-parties
http://www.creativebloq.com/graphic-design-tips/best-free-fonts-for-designers-1233380

4) Negative Space.

Negative space is basically just empty space. You have your focal point, then you have all the extra space around it where there's nothing. This is actually more pleasing to the eye than trying to crowd your space with a ton of things because you're scared it will look empty. Less is more.

Which advertisement is more effective and pleasing to look at?