Communication: Graphic design for non-designers

Let’s be honest about who this is for. You’re a researcher or a coordinator, not a designer. You make a flyer or a slide a few times a year, usually in a free tool like Canva. You might have the Adobe suite, but learning it is not a good use of your time. If you want to become a designer, take a design course – this section won’t make you one, and doesn’t try to.

What it will do is make you good enough to direct tools and judge the result. Because that is what the job actually is now: templates and AI do the production, and your real skill is knowing what good looks like – so you can prompt for it, and tell whether what comes back is any good.

The only mindset you need

You direct, the tool produces, you judge. You are not drawing anything. You are making decisions – what it should say, who it’s for, what matters most – and then checking the output against a standard. Everything below serves those two jobs: setting the standard, and checking against it.

What “good” looks like

You don’t need design theory. You need a handful of tells that separate amateur from professional. Learn to spot these and you can fix 90% of bad designs:

Getting the details right

A few specifics, straight from the CONVERGE “Design made easy for communicators” talk, that fix most problems:

Colour – pick two, with intention

• Two colours are usually enough to create contrast. Use an accent colour for one purpose only (e.g. links), so it keeps its meaning.
• Experiment with shades of the same colour rather than reaching for new ones.
• Don’t be afraid of dark backgrounds – they can look striking and professional, not just white-on-white.
• Test your palette for contrast and colour-blindness before you commit – Coolors, Adobe Color and Buttonbuddy all do this for free.

Fonts – one or two, paired with purpose

• Stick to one or two. For ELIXIR that’s Lato and Open Sans.
• When you do need to pair fonts, a sans-serif heading with a serif body (or vice versa) is a reliable trick. Fontjoy generates pairings for you.

Layout – tidy beats fancy

• The easiest win is alignment, spacing and distribution. Most amateur-looking designs aren’t ugly, just untidy. In PowerPoint, select your objects and use the Align and Distribute tools instead of eyeballing it.
• Align text blocks to the same edge, and give every paragraph the same space before and after it.
• Use blank space to separate sections, and make headings and links obvious through colour and position.

Start from a template, not a blank page

A blank canvas is where non-designers come unstuck. A good template has already made the hard decisions – hierarchy, spacing, fonts, colours – so you only change the content.

• Use the ELIXIR Branding Hub templates wherever one exists – they’re on-brand by default.
• In Canva or Adobe Express, find a clean template and save your own ELIXIR-branded version (correct colours, fonts, logo) once, then reuse it. The second flyer takes minutes.
• Resist customising. Every change you make to a good template is a chance to make it worse. Change the words and the image; leave the structure alone.

Using AI tools well

AI design tools (Canva’s AI features, Adobe Express, and general image tools) are genuinely useful for first drafts, layout ideas, resizing, removing backgrounds and generating supporting imagery. But they only produce something good if you bring the standard.

Prompt with constraints, not vibes

A vague prompt gives generic output. Tell the tool exactly what it needs:

• Purpose and audience – “a webinar announcement for researchers”
• Format and dimensions – “LinkedIn post, square, 1080×1080”
• The one key message – the single thing it must communicate
• Brand constraints – the ELIXIR palette (use the exact hex codes from the Branding Hub) and fonts (Lato / Open Sans)
• Tone – “clean and professional, lots of whitespace, not busy”

Weak prompt: “Make a nice banner for our webinar.”

Strong prompt: “A clean, professional square banner (1080×1080) announcing an ELIXIR webinar for researchers. Use the ELIXIR blue and orange [hex codes], Lato for headings, generous whitespace. One headline, the date, and space for a logo in the corner. Minimal, not busy.”

The hard rules

• Set the colours – don’t hope. AI won’t respect the ELIXIR palette unless you give it the hex codes.
• Check accessibility. Contrast, ALT text, and never leave key information trapped inside the image – see Section 5: Accessibility.
• If it looks off but you can’t say why, run it past the “what good looks like” table. It’s almost always too much text, weak hierarchy, or not enough whitespace.

A workflow you can repeat

• Define the one message, the audience, and the format/size before opening any tool.
• Start from an ELIXIR template, or set your brand constraints (palette hex, Lato/Open Sans).
• Draft it – in Canva, Adobe Express, or with an AI tool given a constraint-rich prompt.
• Judge it against the “what good looks like” table and the squint test.
• Fix the one or two biggest problems (usually: too much text, weak hierarchy).
• Drop in the official logo and check accessibility (contrast, ALT, no text-as-image).
• Get one other person to glance at it before you publish.

Exercise

Take a recent slide or flyer from your Node.

1. Run it through the “what good looks like” table. Which two things are weakest?
2. Either fix those two in your existing tool, or recreate it from an ELIXIR template (or an AI prompt with full brand constraints) and compare.
3. Do the squint test on both versions. Does the key message survive?

The goal isn’t a perfect design – it’s to build the habit of judging before publishing, which is the only design skill you really need.

Dive deeper

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