Module 04 of 11
Design It Yourself
Three principles that do most of the work, the formats each channel actually wants, and one Instagram post for a project you built.
- Estimated time
- 60 min
- Tools used
Canva
Learning objectives
By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Apply contrast, hierarchy and whitespace to judge whether a graphic works.
- Choose the right dimensions and format for a given channel.
- Produce a finished social graphic in Canva from a template you have changed on purpose.
- Explain why using a template unmodified is a branding problem.
Lesson
You do not need taste to make a usable marketing graphic. You need three principles applied consistently, and the discipline to change a template enough that it stops looking like the template.
Contrast: the thing that must be seen, is seen
Contrast is difference big enough to register — in size, weight, colour or space. The commonest failure is timidity: a headline slightly larger than the body text, in a slightly darker grey, reads as a mistake rather than a decision. If two things have different jobs, make them obviously different.
Contrast is also an accessibility requirement, not a preference. Text needs a real luminance difference from its background to be readable by people with low vision, on a phone in daylight, or on a cheap screen. Light grey text on white fails all three.
Hierarchy: one thing first, and only one
Hierarchy is the order in which a viewer takes things in. Every graphic should have exactly one element that arrives first, and everything else should be visibly subordinate to it. The test is simple: show it to someone for one second and ask what it said. If they cannot answer, there are two first things and no hierarchy.
This is where most self-made graphics fail, because everything on them feels important to the person who made it. Deciding what comes second is the actual work.
Whitespace: the cheapest quality signal there is
Whitespace is unfilled area, and treating it as waste is what makes a design look amateur. Space around an element is what makes it look deliberate; space between groups is what tells the eye which things belong together. Increasing the margins is the single fastest improvement to almost any first draft.
Formats: the channel decides the shape
- Square (1:1) — the safe default for a feed post; it survives most crops.
- Portrait (4:5) — takes more vertical space in a feed, which is why it outperforms square when the platform allows it.
- Vertical full-screen (9:16) — stories and short video. Keep anything important away from the top and bottom, where the interface sits.
- Landscape (16:9) — video thumbnails, presentation slides, link previews.
- Wide banner (roughly 3:1) — email headers and site heroes, where the height is constrained but the width is not.
Two file-format rules cover almost everything: PNG for graphics with text and flat colour, JPEG for photographs, and SVG whenever it is a logo or icon you control. Text rendered as a JPEG at low quality is the most common self-inflicted quality problem in marketing graphics.
Tools in this module
Canva
Make One Post for Something You Built
Canva is a browser design tool built around templates with the correct dimensions already set for every channel. The free tier covers everything in this module.
Its real value is not the templates but the constraints: correct sizes, alignment guides, and a font pairing that is at least defensible. It removes the excuses for not producing anything.
Its risk is the same thing. A template used unchanged is recognisable as that template, and being recognisably generic is worse than being plain.
Designing your own assets means you can publish the day you have something to say, instead of waiting on someone else. For a solo business, speed of publishing beats polish almost every time — as long as the result is legible and does not look like everyone else’s.
Your mission
Create a free Canva account and design one Instagram post promoting a project of your own — Metro Amsterdam Live, Eleven Up, or whatever you are building now. Start from a template, then change at least the type, the colours and the layout so it no longer looks like the original.
Open Canva(opens in a new tab)What template did you start from, and what did you change? Then apply the one-second test to your result and write down what it told you.
If your answer to "what did you change" is only the words and the photo, it is still the template.
Quiz
A poster has a headline, a photo, a paragraph and a button, and all four are competing for attention. Which principle is being broken?
A client says your draft "looks empty" and asks you to fill the space. What is the strongest reply?
Match each use to the format that fits it.
Pick the matching item for each row.
- A story that fills a phone screen top to bottom
- A header image across the top of a marketing email
- A logo that must stay sharp at every size
- A photograph of a workspace, for a feed post
Which of these are genuine contrast problems?
Select every answer that applies.
True or false: publishing a Canva template with only the text swapped is fine, because nobody notices templates.
Pick two typefaces and three colours you would use for everything you publish for the next year. Write them down here — that list is your design system, and having one is most of the battle.
One display face, one text face, one ink colour, one background, one accent. Anything more is a decision you will keep re-making.
Score: 0 / 5
Recap
Before you move on, the things worth keeping:
- Contrast means differences big enough to register, and it is an accessibility requirement rather than a taste preference.
- Hierarchy means exactly one element arrives first; the one-second test tells you whether it does.
- Whitespace is what makes a design look deliberate — widening the margins improves almost every first draft.
- The channel decides the shape and the content decides the file type: PNG or SVG for flat colour and text, JPEG for photographs.
- A template used unmodified is recognisable as a template. Change the type, colour and layout, or the graphic works against you.