A Mess of Text

When I'm designing, text is one of the hardest things for me to deal with.  I never know where to put headlines, date, important information.  And I'm constantly struggling to find interesting ways to present text, or fit it around my main graphic.

I think part of it stems from my basic philosophy when it comes to text.  A philosophy that's based on the principle of "I'll deal with it later" which ultimately culminates into "OH MY FREAKIN GAWD, WHERE THE HELL AM I GONNA PUT ALL THIS TEXT!" by the end of the project.

When I design a poster, graphic, or whatever, text is always an afterthought.  I concentrate on creating a graphic first, and once that's done, try to fit in all my text.  It's a bad habit, and I know I should give more thought to the words while I'm coming up with the main design, but, yeah. I need to work on that.

And it's especially a problem when the thing I'm designing requires a lot of text.  Which was the case with a business card that I designed for a client. 

With this project, he wanted a  bunch of information on his business card.  It didn't take to long to put together the graphic, but when I started to think about placing the text feel a little overwhelmed.  If you don't place these kinds of things correctly, you can quickly create one of those super gaudy newspaper style ads.

FOR THE  ENLIGHTENED LOVE OF PEACEFUL SIDDHARTHA, WHERE THE HELL AM I SUPPOSE TO LOOK!!!

So what I ended up doing was ranking my text based on importance.  And since I didn't want to go crazy with bright colors and contrast, I decided to primarily use text size to create emphasis. 

Front

The name obviously being the most important bit of information is presented largest.  Then the text gets smaller in accordance to how I prioritized the information. 

Back

Originally, I had the lower text smaller in comparison to the phone numbers, but ended up enlarging the "Free Estimates" line a little for the sake of balance.

All in all I don't think it turned out too bad.

So how do you guys deal with text in your designs?  Are you a slacker like me and don't think about it till you have to?  Feel free to share how you deal with the problem in the comments section below ;-).