SPACE YOUR SH!T OUT.*

_{Day 101/100 (that feels fun doesn’t it?)}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I had 4 people unsubscribe yesterday. On the 100th day? Rude.

Anywho, we keep going. 101, baby.
No time to dwell on the past. Just forward.

Ok, this is a fun one.

I love designing things. To the point that it gets in the way of shipping.

I spent 4 hours the other night making this

I get in the way all the time.

So, over the years I’ve figured out a few scrappy little tricks that make your designs look weirdly professional - even if you built it in a PowerPoint deck you were also using to explain Q2 pipeline.

I’m talking fake-it-til-you-frame-it tricks.
Hacks that work even when you're holding it all together with Google Slides, free fonts, and a hope.

Let’s start with the easiest one.

The best one?
I’ve used it for years.

Didn’t even know it had a name.

The Japanese have a name for it. Ma.

ま

The space between things.
The appreciation of empty space.

The pause.
The breath.
The gap between.

Basically:

Most bad design is not bad - it’s cramped.

Designed it in PowerPoint

Quick story.

In my agency days, I once built a six-figure pitch deck entirely in PowerPoint.
Every other agency turned up with motion graphics and custom illustrations.

Me?

I used two fonts, white space, and three rectangles.

The client told me, "Yours was the only one that didn’t give us a headache."
We won the deal.

Simplicity is a flex.

Making things simple though, actually really hard.

Alright, here are two more scrappy design hacks that still slap:

Tint your images with your brand color

This one’s sneaky.

I do this on pretty much every picture and background on Penfriend.

Let me explain.

You're cobbling together screenshots, stock photos, random product images. It’s a visual mess.

The fast fix?

Suddenly:

• It looks unified.

• It looks intentional.

• It looks…designed.

No need for a designer. Just slap on a brand-colored rectangle at 15% opacity and move on with your life.

We have two colours. A light blue and an orange.

The orange is for big “NOTICE ME AND CLICK ME” things.
The blue is for everything else.

So, the closer I get to a CTA, the more orange things get tinted.
Start at 15% blue, then 10%, then 5%.
Then 5% orange, then 10% orange.

All the blog pages have a gradient from blue down.
The home page is orange.

Line height = instant maturity

Whenever a page looks “off” and I don’t know why?

It's the line height.

14px text with tight line spacing looks like a school project.
14px text with airy line spacing looks like a SaaS company just raised $8M.

It's dumb. It's real. It works.

Scrappy doesn't mean ugly.

You can build beautiful things with duct tape and paint (the software).

See you tomorrow

✌️ Tim "I once redesigned a landing page on a napkin" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. 
There’s a new thing in this email.
It’s unpolished. Unreleased. Possibly unhinged.

If you want the backstory - ask. I’ll show you the rest.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.