Design Your Digital Product with Confidence: Pro Tips for Non-Designers

You’ve probably seen those beautifully designed digital products—the ones with flawless layouts, that perfect accent font, cohesive color palettes, and custom graphics. They look stunning.

And if you’re anything like most new creators, you want your product to look just as polished.

So, you spend days (or weeks) tweaking colors, obsessing over fonts, scrapping layouts and starting over. You hesitate to launch because your design still doesn’t feel “professional enough,” and every time you think you’re done, you find something else to tweak. 

And just like that, weeks turn into months—and your product still isn’t making you a return on all the time you’ve invested.

The Hidden Cost of Perfectionism

Here’s what most digital product creators don’t realize: every week you spend “perfecting” your product instead of selling it is money left on the table.

Let’s put some numbers to this:

Imagine you’ve created a digital product that sells for $97. You delay your launch by just one month to fuss with the design some more. Let’s say you could have sold 30 copies in that time.

That’s $2,910 in lost revenue.

Now add in the opportunity cost:

💰You could have spent that month promoting your product.
💰You could have started your next offer.
💰You could have built momentum instead of getting stuck in the weeds.

And what’s really holding you back? It’s not the design. 

It’s the fear that your product won’t look “professional enough.” That customers won’t take you seriously unless everything is perfect.

It’s imposter syndrome dressed up as productivity.

The Limiting Beliefs that Sabotage Your Design Process

Let me share something I’ve learned in the last ten years of creating digital products: perfection is the enemy of profit. 

Having worked as a graphic designer for 20 years, I watched countless clients fuss over the wrong details and wind up with an award-winning business card design but no business. 

I learned that behind this strange phenomenon is almost always some kind of fear. 

Yup, there are the loads of limiting beliefs that might be sabotaging your creation process so let’s get into it… 

Analysis Paralysis

When facing too many options (fonts, colors, layouts), you freeze up. Each decision feels monumental when it’s actually quite minimal.

The fix: Create a simple brand guide before you start. Choose two fonts (one for headings, one for body text), three colors (primary, secondary, accent), and stick to them throughout. 

Having pre-set “rules” you stick to eliminates decision fatigue and speeds things up. 

📌 If you need help choosing fonts and a color palette and this is where you tend to get stuck, check out the Brand with Confidence Toolkit. 

Comparisonitis

You’re measuring your first draft against someone else’s fifth version, but what you don’t see are all the cringe-worthy attempts, improvements, and refinements that happened along the way. That’s just how the design process goes… for everyone. 

The fix: Remember that every inspirational result had a humble beginning. When you find yourself comparing, focus back on what matters: helping your customers. (Not beating your competitors in a design competition).

The “One More Tweak” Trap

There’s always one more design adjustment that feels crucial. But each one extends your timeline and chances are your customers wouldn’t even notice the difference.

The fix: Ask yourself: “Does this design change meaningfully improve how easily customers can use and understand my product?” If not, add it to a “design updates” list for the future.

This is the beauty of digital products – you can always improve them after launch, but it’s important to get your “good enough” version into the marketplace where it can be tested with real customers.

Which leads me to…

Feedback Avoidance

Sometimes perfectionism is really just fear of feedback (a.k.a. criticism). You endlessly refine in isolation because exposing your work to the public feels vulnerable and risky.

The fix:  Start with a “minimum viable audience” of 3-5 trusted people who match your target customer. Share your work-in-progress and ask specific, open-ended questions: “What was unclear?” or “What questions do you still have about [topic]?” or “What are you able to do now that you couldn’t before?”

Their feedback will be more valuable during your revision process than making assumptions on your own, and the positive comments will give you confidence to move forward.

The 80/20 Rule of Digital Product Creation

If your really want to stop spinning your wheels and launch faster (and start making sales), follow this simple rule:

Spend 80% of your time on the content and features that deliver the transformation your customers want.

Spend 20% on design—not just to make it pretty, but to make it clear, usable, and functional

Most creators do the opposite. They obsess over design first instead of the things their audience is actually paying for.

But the truth is: Design is a tool, not the value.

Good design isn’t all about aesthetics—it’s about making your product easy to use and understand.

What it doesn’t mean?

❌ Shopping for hours to find the perfect font
❌ Figuring out color combos you like better than the one that’s already great
❌ Searching endlessly for the perfect stock photos or graphics 

Your goal is to get your product into the hands of the people who are out there waiting for your help – and they don’t need you to select a slightly different shade of blue. 

What “Good Design” Actually Means

Most creators get caught up in making things look pretty but “design” isn’t a synonym for “decoration.” 

The primary purpose of design is to support the purpose and function of your product, and to help your customers to achieve their goals with minimal friction.

So if you want to feel confident that your product is well-designed, run through this simple checklist:

• Is it organized in a logical way? Can readers easily find specific information or sections they’re looking for without getting lost?
• Is your text comfortable to read? Have you chosen a readable font size and included enough white space to prevent eye strain?
• Are your formatting choices consistent? Do your headings, subheadings, callout boxes, and other elements follow the same style throughout?
• Do all your links and interactive elements work properly? Have you tested them on different devices to make sure customers can access everything as intended?
• Does your color scheme enhance readability/usability? Or does it distract from your content?

If you’re easily checking off these boxes, you’re good. But let’s turn this up a notch and silence the most common self-doubt scenarios… 

But what if customers think it looks unprofessional?

Remember that “professional” means different things to different people. What matters most is that your product delivers what it promises.  When in doubt, err on the side of simplicity. Professional graphic designers focus more on “what can be taken away” than “what can I add to this?” 

But what if my competitors’ products look better?

#truthbomb: There will always be prettier products out there. Always. Just remember that design can elevate the perception of quality, but it isn’t the quality in and of itself. 

But what if I get negative feedback about the design?

Even the most talented designers get negative feedback on a regular basis, it’s just that they’ve learned to have a thick skin about it. Do what they do: use the feedback to make improvements if it makes sense and don’t take it personally. 

Negative design feedback isn’t a reflection of your worth or expertise; and it’s usually a matter of subjective opinion anyway. 

3 Final Tips to Conquer Design Insecurity and Launch Faster

Now that you understand what really matters in digital product design, let’s wrap up with some actionable steps to help you move from overthinking to launching with confidence.

1️⃣ Look at your competitors once before you start, then focus on your own work.
Getting inspiration is helpful, but constant comparison leads to self-doubt and unnecessary revisions. Set a time limit for research, then close those tabs and trust your own vision.

2️⃣ Use templates to eliminate design guesswork.
You don’t need to create everything from scratch. Professional templates allow you to drag, drop, and publish instead of wasting hours fussing.

3️⃣ Set a time limit for design.
Give yourself a hard deadline to format your product and stick to it. The goal isn’t to win a design award—it’s to launch a product that sells. Try using a timer for design sessions to prevent perfectionism from taking over.

And a bonus tip: launch before you feel 100% ready. No matter how much you tweak, you’ll always find things to improve. Get your “good enough” product out there and iterate later if needed. You got this. 💪

Taking Action: From Advice to Implementation

I hope these tips have helped you you move past design hang-ups and launch your digital product with confidence! Remember – your expertise and the results you deliver are what truly matter to your customers.

You can put these tips into practice right away or find tools to help you along, but the most important thing is to take action. Launch your product, get feedback, and make improvements as you go.

If You Want to Speed Things Up

If you’d like to save time on the design process, the Make It Sell It Toolkit might be just what you need.

We created this after watching countless creators (ourselves included) get stuck in the design phase for way too long. It includes:

✅ Polished, professional digital product layouts—without endless tweaking
✅ Sales page templates for WordPress & Canva, so you don’t waste time figuring out what converts
✅ 300+ plug-and-play Canva templates to create presentation slides, course materials, eBooks, and more. 

It’s the same system hundreds of creators use to create and sell beautifully-designed digital products quickly—and you can use it too!

⚡Special offer for our blog readers who’ve made it this far: Because we’re on a mission to help as many digital product creators as possible, we’re offering our best-selling digital product template kit at 50% off for a limited time. 

Click here to see everything that’s inside the Make It Sell It Toolkit and use the coupon code MISI-50 at checkout to claim your discount before this offer disappears. 

We hope to see you inside, but either way, let this be the moment you stop overthinking and start selling!