Graphic design for social, ads and marketing

What a design brief needs before anyone opens the software

Most design revisions are caused by a weak brief, not weak design. A brief that names the goal, the audience, the placement and the constraint will usually land in one or two rounds. A brief that says "something eye-catching for Instagram" will not.

Four things do most of the work. The job the asset has to do, stated as an action: get a click to the pricing page, get a registration, make a product recognisable. The exact placement and size, because a LinkedIn carousel and a Meta feed ad are different design problems. The copy, or at least the maximum word count, since text volume changes the layout entirely and copy that arrives after the design is finished forces a rebuild. And the non-negotiables: which logo version, which colours, whether a legal line is required, whether a price can be shown.

We also ask for two references you like and one you do not, with a sentence on why. Negative references are more useful than positive ones. "Too corporate" or "too busy" tells us more about the boundary than three examples of work you admire, because admiration is often about the brand rather than the design.

• The action you want the viewer to take
• Exact placement, size and any platform rules
• Final or near-final copy, not placeholder text
• Brand non-negotiables and any legal requirements
• Two references you like, one you do not, with reasons

Hierarchy, contrast and the design principles that decide whether it reads

A social graphic is usually seen for under a second while scrolling. Whether it works depends almost entirely on visual hierarchy: the order in which the eye picks things up, and whether that order matches what you want understood.

Hierarchy is built with size, weight, colour and space. One element should be clearly dominant, one supporting, and everything else quiet. The common failure is designing three things at the same level of emphasis, which leaves the viewer with no entry point and so they scroll past. If everything is important, nothing is. When we review a draft we look at it squinted or at a tenth of its size, because whatever survives that is what viewers actually receive.

Contrast is the other half. Text over a photograph needs either a solid colour block behind it, a gradient scrim, or enough tonal separation to survive. Light grey text on a white background is a recurring design fashion and it fails accessibility standards and fails on a phone in daylight. The practical benchmark is the WCAG contrast ratio: at least 4.5 to 1 for body-sized text and 3 to 1 for large text. Meeting it costs nothing and makes the design work for more people, including everyone reading outdoors.

Designing for platform specs without redrawing everything

Every channel wants a different size, and the wasteful way to handle it is designing each one from scratch. The efficient way is to design one master layout that is built to be reframed, then adapt rather than recreate.

That means a few decisions at the start. Keep the key message and any focal image inside a central area that survives being cropped from 16:9 down to 1:1 and 9:16. Set type as live text on its own layer rather than baked into an image, so it can be resized per format instead of scaled and blurred. Build backgrounds that extend beyond the canvas, so a taller crop has something to fill with. Keep logo and any legal text as separate placed elements with their own clear space.

The formats worth planning for in most campaigns are 1:1 for feeds, 4:5 for the tallest feed post, 9:16 for stories and vertical video placements, 16:9 for web and YouTube, plus whatever fixed banner sizes your display advertising uses. Ad platforms also limit how much of an image can be text in some placements, and while the hard rejection rules have softened, text-heavy creative still tends to be shown less. Designing to a lower text ratio is the safer default.

• Design a master with a crop-safe central area
• Keep type live and on its own layer, never flattened into the image
• Extend backgrounds past the canvas edge for taller crops
• Plan 1:1, 4:5, 9:16 and 16:9 from the start
• Keep text volume low on paid social creative

Building templates your team can use without breaking them

Templates are where design spend stops being a per-asset cost and starts being an asset in itself. A good template lets a non-designer produce something on brand. A bad one lets them produce something embarrassing with your logo on it.

The difference is constraint. A useful template locks what should never change: logo placement and size, colour palette, type styles, margins, and the grid. It opens only what genuinely varies: the headline, a supporting line, a photograph, and perhaps a call to action. If a template lets someone move the logo, retype in a different font, or drop an image into a space that has no defined crop, it will drift within a month.

We build templates in the tool your team actually uses. That usually means Canva or Figma rather than Adobe files, because a template nobody can open is not a template. We set up locked layers, defined text styles, image frames with fixed crops, and a short one-page usage note covering what to change and what to leave. We also include the source files in a professional format, so the design can be extended properly later without being rebuilt.

• Lock logo, palette, type styles, margins and grid
• Open only headline, supporting copy, image and call to action
• Use image frames with fixed crops so photos cannot be stretched
• Build in the tool the team already uses
• Include a one-page note on what may and may not change

Type, colour and file formats that hold up in production

A design that looks right in the design file and wrong in production has almost always failed on one of three technical points: fonts, colour mode or export format.

Fonts have licences, and web use, app use and embedding in a PDF are often licensed separately from desktop use. A font that a designer has installed is not automatically a font you are permitted to use in an advertisement. We check licensing at the brief stage and, if needed, recommend a close alternative from an openly licensed library, which avoids a problem that tends to surface at the worst moment.

Colour mode decides whether things match. Screen work is RGB and should be specified in hex so it is unambiguous. Print work is CMYK, and bright RGB colours, particularly saturated blues and greens, simply cannot be reproduced in CMYK ink and will come back duller than expected. Where a brand colour matters exactly across print runs, a spot colour reference is the reliable option. Format then follows: SVG for logos and flat graphics on the web because it stays sharp at any size and is tiny, PNG for screen graphics needing transparency, JPEG for photographic content, and print-ready PDF with fonts outlined, images at 300 dpi and bleed included for anything going to a printer.

• Check font licensing for the actual use, not just desktop
• Specify screen colour in hex, print colour in CMYK or spot
• SVG for logos and flat graphics on the web
• Print PDFs need outlined fonts, 300 dpi images and bleed
• Always keep the editable source file, not only the export

How review rounds should work

Design revisions get expensive when feedback is unstructured or arrives in the wrong order. A clear review process cuts the number of rounds roughly in half without anyone compromising on quality.

The order matters most. Concept feedback comes first: is this the right idea and the right approach? Then layout and hierarchy: is the message in the right order? Then detail: copy, colour, spacing, alignment. Feedback that jumps to detail while the concept is unsettled wastes the detailing work, because it gets discarded when the direction changes. We present early work deliberately rough for this reason, so the conversation stays at concept level.

The other half is consolidation. Feedback should arrive once, from one person, with conflicting internal views already resolved. Three stakeholders sending separate contradictory notes puts the designer in the position of arbitrating a decision that is not theirs to make. We also ask for feedback that describes the problem rather than prescribing the fix. "The price is hard to find" is more useful than "make the price bigger", because the problem may be solved better by moving it than by enlarging it.

• Review concept, then layout, then detail, in that order
• Consolidate all stakeholder feedback into one response
• Describe the problem, let the designer propose the fix
• Supply final copy before detailed design begins
• Agree the number of rounds up front so scope stays clear