Marco Vannini

Make constraints! Constraints are crucial when moodboarding. Whether it's for an internal project a collaboration or client work, always put a cap on the amount of data/inspiration/imagery you'll gather. The lower the cap, the better. The pitfall of not setting constraints is making a soup with one too many spices where you can't tell the salt from the pepper. This will make the design process clumsy and slow because designers won't have a clear direction to follow, and odds are they end up drifting far away from the project's original needs.

A big mistake I see founders make is thinking about their brand's visual identity as a set-in-stone rulebook rather than an evolving organism. They put too much weight on trivial elements like the logo or color palette and throw under the rug the substance of the brand: vision, values, voice, target, etc. The boldest and most memorable brands are born from the inside out. Their visual identity stands out because their DNA is hardwired for it. For starters, keeping it slim and basic in terms of visual ID while the brand's substance comes to broil is a great way to avoid confusion. The identity will evolve and crystalize itself as the brand clashes with the market and its ideal customers.

Emulating is one of the quickest paths, if not THE quickest, to improving one's skills. When I first started digital illustration I copied other artists' process videos on YouTube. I followed them move by move, click by click, and mimicked every single stroke. For those of us who are not of the "sit down and learn the theory" kind of person, getting your hands to work is the way. I'd also recommend incremental bumps in difficulty. Never stick for too long in the amateur ground. The minute it feels *easy* find ways of making it tougher. Easy gets boring and you'll lose interest in the learning process in no time!

A fun exercise I've been doing for years to study and understand white space is digital collage: Pick a handful of photos and drop them into a canvas on your design tool of choice. Canva, Illustrator, Figma, or Photoshop, all work. Use the selection tools to splice them how you like and distribute them around the canvas. Then, add elements like basic shapes, patterns, textures, typography, and whatnot. Play with color, size, contrast, and hierarchies, until you're happy with the composition. Lastly, the fun part: subtract! Take as much as way as you possibly can by using white space. The goal is to achieve visual balance across the composition without losing the initial idea. You'll quickly realize a lot can be said with little.

Visuals, visuals, and more visuals! Make sure all key points are well depicted using either illustrations, graphs, collages, comparison charts, or powerful imagery. The latter can be sourced from royalty-free photo banks like Unsplash and Pexels. All good for commercial use. Leverage your brand's typography to highlight important ideas or single-out phrases. Don't be afraid to use big headlines and take up space across the spreads. A few impactful headlines here and there create pattern interruptions, which make the lecture less dull and more engaging. Also, don't undermine font styles. Bold text helps the reader's eyes navigate through the document, whilst italics are great for accentuating words. Bottomline: + images and - text!