We all know the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover.” But after more than ten years of publishing, and after tens of thousands of books sold, I can tell you: we absolutely do judge books by their covers.
And that’s true for a lot of communications. Books, flyers, invitations, emails, you name it. We care about how things look, even if we don’t intuitively understand it.
Very few people will look at a poorly designed invitation to an event and think, “What a bad design, I don’t want to go to this.”
Instead, they think: “This doesn’t look like it’s for me.” Or perhaps more likely: “I can’t tell what this is and I don’t have the mental space to try to figure it out.” And they move on to the next item.
This has always been true, but with the firehose of information coming at us every day, it’s even more true now.
Having an eye toward design shouldn’t be seen as being frivolous or extra. It’s necessary now to get your message across.
Given the realities of small nonprofits, how might you go about building a good design and brand?
Well, as it happens, my wife Mary is a graphic designer who has focused on nonprofits for the last twenty years! She’s worked with some of the largest nonprofits and some of the smallest nonprofits (and has designed the covers of all my “little books” for which I’m deeply grateful).
I asked Mary what organizations on a shoestring budget could do to spruce up their design and branding. Here are some of her tips:
Be consistent with your colors.
Choose a color that represents your nonprofit and stick to it. And don’t just say “blue!” Rather, write down the actual “hex” color in your files so you stick with it. And then choose one to two other colors that look good with your main color as accents. And stick with those too. All your communications should use those colors.
Be consistent with your fonts.
Choose a standard font for headlines and titles. This should be readable at a distance, so keep it fairly simple. You should also have a standard “web font” that you use for “body text” in your email communications. This helps make your designs better too, because you aren’t tempted to use a bunch of fonts. One for headlines and one for body text is plenty. Aim for consistency here too.
The goal of consistent colors and fonts is that someone should be able to at a glance that a piece comes from you. Even if you don’t pick colors and fonts as well as a professional graphic designer, that’s ok! Even if they are not exactly right, consistency is a huge help to the person you’re trying to communicate with.
Consider a design tool like Canva.
Many nonprofits can get the pro features of Canva for free. It’s a useful tool for amateur graphic designers. In Canva, you can select your official colors and fonts to help keep you consistent. And you can take design templates and adapt them to your colors and imagery (this almost always ends up with a better design than starting from scratch on your own). Less is usually more when it comes to design.
If you have a logo, make sure you have a folder of it that contains all the possible versions you will need.
You will need a color version of it, a one-color version, a white version (for when it’s put onto something dark). Plus, you’ll need it in a few formats. The most versatile version is a .PNG with a transparent background. It will go on many designs. You might also want an .EPS if you ever want it printed at large scale or high resolution (banners and t-shirts and such). If you don’t have these versions of your logo, consider asking the original designer for them. Or you might be able to reverse-engineer it in Canva with some practice.
