Do you want to improve your content online, but feel you lack the necessary skills? The key to improving your content isn’t to be a better designer or writer. It’s understanding one simple principle about how your brain works.
I share more about this principle, along with 3 tips and simple tutorials to improve your content in my article published on Medium.com. Read the preview below, then head over to Medium for all the details.
Think you suck at design? I’ll tell you why that might be true and how you can instantly get better, but first we need to talk about your brain.
Your brain’s main job is to keep you alive. To do that it has to burn a whole lot of calories. In fact, your brain burns more calories than any other organ in your body, demanding 20 percent of your resting metabolic rate. Processing new information takes up a lot of that energy, so to conserve it your brain constantly scans your environment for the most efficient ways to help you get through your day
When you’re bombarded with a mass of information that isn’t relevant to your survival, your brain tunes it out. It doesn’t want to waste calories on something that isn’t relevant to your basic needs.
For example, if you’re hungry and you’re looking for a good burger place, an ad that highlights a singular tasty burger wins over an ad that shows a smorgasbord of meat. Why? Because it solves your hunger problem the fastest, meaning your brain had to burn fewer calories to get what it needed to help you survive.
If your businesses website banner, Instagram posts, brochures and other marketing materials are busy, cluttered, or confusing, would-be customers will tune them out and keep moving, because the images have failed to answer their basic question, “How does this information help me?”
So the key to good design isn’t “being a good designer,” it’s understanding how to arrange visual information in a way that helps your brain burn the fewest number of calories.
Here are three of the most common design mistakes that burn unnecessary calories and are actually incredibly easy to fix. Master them and you’ll be designing like a pro in no time.
