Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid When Designing Your Advertising Flag

Despite the popularity of digital advertisements, advertising flags remain to be a strong component of your marketing campaigns. Advertising flags are affordable, durable, and practical ways of capturing your market’s attention. Established brands and newcomers still take advantage of the versatility, simplicity, and impact that these flags offer. If you will be mixing both traditional marketing tools such as advertising flags into your campaign, be wary of the common mistakes to avoid. 

Coming up with a design takes up a lot of time, energy, and other resources. You don’t want your hard work to be wasted because of simple mistakes such as spelling errors. Imagine you have already put the final design into at least a hundred flags only to realize a misspelling after printing. What a nightmare! This will not only cost you money but also time, energy, and the morale of your team. This is why it’s important to be aware of the common mistakes and prevent yourself from committing them.  

Below are the top 10 mistakes often committed by designers or brand owners. Read through it thoroughly and be conscious to avoid them at all costs. 

1. Incorrect Font Usage & Neglecting Readability

Remember that your advertising flags are a medium for communication. You want the message to be as crystal clear as possible to anyone who gets to read it. If the target market fails to understand your messaging, it could probably be due to the font choice. Choose fonts carefully as they depict certain characteristics that will be incorporated into your brand. Some fonts look proud and bold, while others exude simplicity. According to an article published on the Colour Graphics website, the following are some of the best fonts for advertising: 

• Helvetica 
• Bodoni Moda
• Copperplate
• Trajan
• Avenir
• Sentinel
• Petunia
• Arial
• Impact
• Brush Script

Choice of font is essential in making a positive impression on your market. It provides an additional plus factor in the overall visual appearance of your design. In addition, the right font ensures that your message is read from a distance. If you choose too stylish or complicated fonts, the brand messaging could be unclear, too long to read, and difficult to read even from a short distance.  

2. Overcrowding with Information & Design Clutter 

Have you seen a banner or an advertising flag where there’s just too much going on? You don’t even know where you focus your attention, right? As the saying goes, ‘less is more.’ Sometimes, the more we add more elements to the design, the more it gets cluttered. We understand that brands want to convey a lot of things to their customers, but it should be done strategically. If there’s too much information within the design, you’ll get your readers confused. The messaging should be concise and straight to the point. Keep it simple and focused. 

Additionally, information in the design also includes too many call-to-actions (CTAs). Brands should decide what exactly they want from their market. Do you want them to visit the store, attend the event, purchase your product, or follow you on social media and other CTAs? Having to ask your customers to do a lot of things could take away their actions and could probably upset them. You don’t want customers walking out from your brand because you’re asking too much from them, it gets overwhelming. 

3. Wrong Color Choices

According to color psychology, colors are essential in helping your brand connect to its customers. Graphic artists should have a deep understanding of color psychology and how colors are related to human behavior. Color selection is an important part of branding and marketing. Colors are integral in evoking certain emotions that correlate to people recognizing your brand. In addition, it’s essential to have them take action. Below are just some of the meanings behind each color to provide you with some guidance. 

• Red – Helps capture attention. This color is used by designers if they want to express excitement and passion. You might have noticed that flags in red communicate a store sale promotion or discount offering. 
• Orange – Promotes creativity and enthusiasm. These are more accurately used by brands for kids’ products. The color is playful but not as intense as compared to Red. 
• Yellow – Shows happiness and positivity. This color is used by brands to promote carefree and positive vibes in their design. 
• Pink – Associated with femininity. This color is often related to the female target market. If your product or service is targeted towards a female audience, you can consider using this color in your marketing designs.   

These are just some of the meanings behind every color. Take time to do your research to have a deeper understanding of what each color represents. This will help you connect better with your audience. Do not just choose a color based on your liking but make sure it aligns well with your brand’s identity and what it represents. 

4. Inconsistency Branding 

Designers may want to explore and create designs that are novel and out of the box. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of sacrificing consistency when it comes to branding. Before starting the design for your advertising flag, the brand font, logos, colors, and other visual elements should have been finalized first. This is the first step in promoting your brand’s identity. 

Once everything is finalized, designers should be consistent in using them across all marketing material. Is this important? Yes, if you want people to recognize your brand right away. Imagine having an event and each event, you’ll be using different colors and fonts for your brand. People can probably mistake it for another brand, get confused, or won’t recognize your brand right away. 

5. Failure to use high-resolution images

This is another mistake that you should avoid if you want to make a good impression on your market. A blurred image on your marketing tool resonates with poor planning, disorganization, and unprofessionalism. Always make sure that your designers only use high-quality images to make sure that the printing is vibrant, crisp, and clear. Advertising flags with printed designs look sharp and appealing and catch attention. Compare it to those with blurred and pixelated images. People will just look away. 

6. Absence of Contrast

Do not forget to include contrast in your design to make it more captivating. Remember that you’re competing with a lot of other brands out there. You want your flags to stand out from the rest. With proper contrast, your message can easily be read against the background. Additionally, it helps people to see the message from a distance. But, be careful in choosing the contrast. If you use neon green against black, the color combination might not be suitable for the event or location. 

7. Not considering the flag’s shape and size

Remember that advertising flags come in various shapes and sizes. This means that the shape and size of the flag should be considered. If you ignore these factors, the design could be cut off once it gets printed. Ignoring the flag’s shape and size could hurt the design. The design’s font could be too small or too large in consideration of the flag’s size. Before starting with the design, always ask first what will be the shape and size of the flag where it gets printed. 

8. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors

If you missed out on doing the proper quality checks before approving the final art, you are in for terrible headaches. A spelling and grammatical error could not only cost you money but it could hurt your brand. Imagine if your designer placed a 50% discount instead of just 5% and it got printed and people started availing the promo already. Since your organization is not prepared for a 50% discount, this could turn into a lot of disappointed customers. 

In addition, having these typos and grammatical errors can undermine your brand’s credibility and integrity. Make sure to always proofread your design before giving it a green light for printing. 

9. Consider Your Target Audience

When designing your advertising flag, think about your audience. Who will be looking at those flags? Are those for the younger generation or the older ones? If it’s for the latter, do you think there’s a need to adjust the font size to make sure that they can still read it? Designers need to understand who their audience is and tailor the design according to their needs. 

10. Failing to Test in Different Environments

If you are printing hundreds to thousands of advertising flags for your event, make sure to do test printing. This is vital in making sure that the overall design does not have any issues. Test your flags in different environments so you can make the necessary adjustments before mass printing. 

You might notice that the font is difficult to read or the size is too small to read from a distance. You can then ask your team to make all the necessary changes. 

Designing an advertising flag requires expertise and experience. If you lack both, consider working with a professional to help you with the design. These graphic designers have the eyes and the skills for the details. Their expertise can readily spot if something is off. In addition, they can help you avoid the mistakes listed above considering their experience. Of course, no one is perfect and mistakes could still happen but it could be minimized having to work with experts. 

Conclusion

Successful marketing is having designs that capture attention and convey your message effectively. Make sure to avoid these common design mistakes to uphold your brand’s credibility and professionalism. Focus on creating a visually appealing, clear, and brand-consistent flag, so you can maximize the impact of your advertising efforts. These advertising flags convey your brand identity. Investing the time and effort needed to create a design is integral to achieving success.