What makes a design look professional

Put a homemade poster next to a professional one and anyone can tell which is which. Almost nobody can say why. Learning to say why is the whole course.

It is almost never talent, and almost never the software. It is a short list of very fixable things:

Too many fonts. Amateur work often uses four or five. Professional work usually uses one or two.

Nothing lines up. Elements sit at slightly different left edges. Individually invisible, together it reads as sloppy.

No breathing room. Beginners fill the space because empty space feels wasted. Empty space is what makes the rest look deliberate.

Everything is the same size. If the headline, the details and the phone number all shout equally, the eye does not know where to start.

Too many colours, usually at full strength.

Stretched images. A photo squashed to fit is the single fastest way to look unprofessional, and it takes two seconds to avoid.

Notice what is not on that list: creativity, drawing ability, expensive software. Those six faults are mechanical, and fixing them mechanically will lift your work above most of what you see on local Facebook pages this week.

That is the honest promise of this course. It will not make you an artist. It will let you produce work that looks like it was made by someone who was paid — and that is what a client is buying.