Table stakes

“I relished technical details, I could ferret out new opportunities quickly and was a workhorse in logging the hours to get sh*t done. These traits have all served me well as an entrepreneur, but I realise now that they’re just table stakes.”

• Tim Brown, The career arc of specialists and generalists

There’s some hard and fast rules of thumb to get a base level of design skill.

Professional designers can play and bend these rules to suit a specific vision.

They’ve earned that right and we haven’t so ignore at your peril.

Canvas size.

Anything we put together starts with a blank page.

In the online world this is usually represented in pixel dimensions.

For example, an Instagram square is 1024x1024. Sometimes the dimensions are represented as a ratio like 1:1 or 1.6:1. Then the volume of pixels determines the resolution of the image. A website is different again the pixel width is going to vary from screen to screen, and will look very different on a mobile versus a desktop.

Tools like Canva and Squarespace take care of a lot of this detail, but being aware of sizes helps everything you do.

Things need to go into their sizes.

You can always shrink something down, but blowing things up won’t work without scalable graphics and more advanced design software than I’m advocating for you to use.

Less is more.

When you’re putting together visuals, it’s best to exercise restraint.

Don’t try to do too much. If in doubt leave it out. Never add something just because you think it looks good it’s better to err on the side of less.

Less colours, less fonts, less shapes, less pictures, less is best.

If you’ve ever seen a PowerPoint presentation from a local community organisation with clipart and bizarre animations you know what I’m talking about.

30-20-10.

You can have a size 30 heading, some size 20 sub-headings, and size 10 body copy. This works for slides, emails, and even one-sheeter PDFs. It’s a ratio you can fall back on if anything is required to be made from scratch. The Rule of 3 applies here with visuals too. Follow it for

Learn some basic tools.

There are some great tools out there that make it easy to spruce up your designs, or give you templates so you can get a head start.

It’s still worth learning your way around an image editor and slide builder. Say the profile picture for your bio that’s being featured needs to be in a certain size, being able to resize it on the fly with a tool is handy.

I’m on a Mac and use Pixelmator Pro (images) and Keynote (slides) one is cheap and the other is free.

Email formatting.

When you’re starting, it doesn’t really matter if you have a Gmail, Hotmail, or what mail.

The big mistake I see with emails is formatting. If you’re delivering a service and using wording that you’re copy + pasting, make sure you’re grabbing those words from a non-styled text editor. It looks super-amateur pitching to a prospect and the top of your email personalised and the bottom a straight-up paste job.

If you’re in doubt, send the email to your burner account to see what it looks like. If you don’t have a burner set one up!

You’re not sending all those newsletters to your main account are you?

That’s gross.