My hope is that you come to love graphic design as I do. At its best, it uses your whole brain and can take you to a blissful state of flow. It’s an interface between consciousness and matter. Designers take invisible, abstract concepts and make them tangible. We transfer ideas from one mind to another. It’s a science and an art.
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
I’m Linda Pizzitola, a self-employed graphic designer since the days when personal computers were just going mainstream in 1996. I studied the fundamentals of layout, typography, color, gestalt principles, the psychology of design, branding, marketing, and the creative process itself. I would have loved to have someone 'spoon feed’ me as I climbed the many learning curves required. I didn't even have Google back then. It was stacks of library books and an occasional seminar.
I did have the luxury of having my dear brother Tim, three time zones away, teach me how to use page layout software by email. And what a difference a coach made! Having someone hold my hand and guide me from A to Z was a priceless gift.
I’ve had multiple opportunities to pay that gift forward, including coaching friends and family members, teaching graphic design classes at my local college, and over a decade of sharing
design topics for non-designers in my newsletter-turned-blog. kauaidesign.com/blog
MY MISSION
My goal is to help beginning designers climb the learning curve. I want to raise the bar
on DIY design by sharing with you 1) design principles that have stood the test of time and 2) sales psychology backed by the latest neuroscience. I invite you to step up your graphic communications with free bite-sized articles, tips and tutorials on design fundamentals, writing effective copy, and the creative process itself. Let my decades of experience swimming in the sea of graphic design inform and improve upon your work.
I hope you'll join our community of up and coming graphic designers as we hone our craft, share our work, nurture each other's creativity, and have fun along the way. Sign
up below to receive graphic design tips and short articles in your Inbox twice a month.
Also, to create an online space for sharing the journey, a new Facebook group is gearing up at facebook.com/groups/diydesign.tips YOU are invited.
Though drag and drop, template-based software has made graphic design highly accessible, many DIY designers today are skipping over the essential step of design education. And it shows. We don’t know what we don’t know after all.
But discerning audiences recognize the signs of an amateur, even if they can’t exactly cite the design principles being violated. I made a lot of mistakes myself as a beginner. I look back and cringe sometimes. I didn’t know. But now that I know what I know, foundational principles of good design matter. A lot.