Agus Esperón Wideo.co Co Founder & Head of UX/Design @agustinesperon

This post is part of Agus’s design and video how-to’s series.

In the world of digital marketing, brands often feel the pressure to publish lots of visual content in order to feed the growing appetite of online customers as well as to keep up with the accelerating pace that that social media platforms are innovating for mediums such as video.

Not to mention the pressure of producing video content that looks great. A good rule of thumb to follow when embracing video marketing is the following: Spend the production time your company needs to really focus in on the message you want to send to your customer.

This is crucial to designing an engaging video versus one that does not meet the standards of your brand, and therefore can risk turning viewers off to your content.

Here are our golden design rules to help your video team produce beautiful-looking and engaging videos for your website, social media, or other marketing channels.

1. Color

An example of cool colors. Changing background colors keeps things dynamic. You can find this video template in the Wideo templates library.

Your video’s color scheme is the backbone of its design. You can use color throughout a video or in key moments to drive emotion for the audience.

An important thing to keep in mind that everything from background color to accents should create readability. Your background colors should contrast text and images—which are the true focus of a scene—not blur them together.

There are lots of tools to help guide you towards choosing crisp and clean color palettes for your marketing video. Some of our favorites include pre-designed color combinations likes the ones below, and this interactive color scheme maker from Adobe.

Pro tip: Upload color palette image files to the Wideo editor and use the eye drop tool to save them to your tool box.

2. Typography

Just as colors reveal a design’s emotions, fonts establishes a video’s tone and identity. Is your company video educating customers on a serious topic or teasing an upcoming product launch? Who is the customer you’re speaking to? Typography complements other elements of your design create an eye-catching, memorable video aesthetic.

San serif fonts—the font used in this blog post is a sans serif because it doesn’t have small lines at the end of its characters—are modern-looking and are generally easier to read in blocks of text. Handwritten fonts are playful and give a natural look to your video.

You can also mix and match modern, playful, or classic typefaces to create a unique look—it all depends on the purpose and audience of your communication.

3. Imagery

While video text does much of the telling, imagery does nearly all of the showing.

Video imagery includes everything from photos to graphics such as icons. They help people visualize the text and message behind your communication. The key to creating balance with images is not to combine too many visual elements together. Graphics and images should create focus around the text—not compete for the viewer’s attention.

We like to use photos of a friendly face to give our video designs a personal touch. It’s also important to maintain a cohesive and professional look. When choosing graphics, make sure that they share a similar style.

4. Balance

The way you arrange your design elements in one scene is called composition. The composition balances your text with your images in a way that maximizes readability and style. The most important element in a scene (generally a title or an illustrative image) should “pop” for a viewer, and the way you can achieve this is by creating a visual hierarchy.

Supplementary objects should be smaller in size compared to the most important objects. This creates a visual cue that directs your audience’s eyes directly to the most important information.

Bonus Tips:

1. Your video intro is crucial. Make the first few seconds count.

2. Get inspired by what works.

Customer Story: How Serant Consulting Reduced Video Production Costs

Serant Consulting provides video marketing services for their clients. The company faced two major problems: Producing videos was very costly and took a long time to produce with the complex software they were using.

Since Serant Consulting started using Wideo to edit their videos, they’ve reduced external costs and production time. Read their full story here.