Design isn't just about looking pretty anymore. Honestly, if you're still thinking about "how to make design" as a purely aesthetic exercise, you're probably invisible to Google. I’ve seen countless brands pour five-figure budgets into sleek, minimalist branding only to watch their traffic flatline because they forgot that Google is, at its heart, an accessibility and information engine. It wants to understand your pixels.
Google Discover is a different beast entirely. It’s a literal "discovery" engine that feeds on high-quality, high-impact imagery. You aren't competing with other articles; you're competing with a user's attention span while they’re waiting for their coffee. If your design doesn't pop, you don't exist.
The Secret Sauce of Ranking Your Visuals
Standard SEO focuses on text. We know that. But visual SEO is the new frontier. To understand how to make design that actually moves the needle, you have to look at how Google’s Vision AI parses an image. It’s looking for entities. If you have an article about the best hiking boots and your image is a blurry shot of a mountain range without a single boot in sight, Google gets confused.
Don't confuse the bot.
👉 See also: How Can I See What I Liked on Instagram? Here is Where the Setting Moved
Specificity wins. When you’re crafting a featured image, it needs to be at least 1200 pixels wide. That’s the threshold for Google Discover eligibility. But size is just the baseline. You need a clear focal point. Busy, cluttered designs with tiny text overlays are a death sentence for Discover. Why? Because most people are looking at these on a five-inch screen. If they can’t tell what they’re looking at within half a second, they’re scrolling past you.
Why Your Alt Text Probably Sucks
We've been told for years to "put keywords in the alt text." That’s old-school thinking. It’s also kinda lazy. Modern accessibility standards—and Google’s ranking algorithms—want descriptive, helpful text.
Instead of writing "blue running shoes," try "Side view of a Nike Pegasus running shoe in cobalt blue on a paved track." See the difference? One is a keyword dump. The other is a description that helps a visually impaired user and tells Google exactly what the "entities" in the image are. This is how you build E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) through design.
Real experts don't skip the details. They use WebP formats because they’re smaller and faster. Speed is a ranking factor. A beautiful 5MB PNG is a weight around your website’s neck. If your site takes three seconds to load because of an unoptimized "hero" image, your bounce rate will skyrocket, and Google will bury you in the search results. Use tools like Squoosh or TinyPNG. It takes ten seconds. Just do it.
The Discover Feed is a Popularity Contest
Google Discover is driven by "interestingness." It’s basically a personalized magazine. To get in, your design needs to feel editorial. Stock photos are the kiss of death here. We’ve all seen the "woman laughing at a salad" or the "diverse group of people looking at a laptop." Users are blind to them now.
Try using original photography or custom data visualizations.
💡 You might also like: That Famous Picture of Apple Computer Logo: What Most People Get Wrong
Data is a massive ranking signal. If you can take a complex concept and turn it into a simple, branded infographic, other sites will link to it. Backlinks are the gold currency of SEO. When someone embeds your chart because it explains "how to make design" better than a thousand words could, your authority scores go through the roof.
Technical Hurdles Nobody Mentions
Let’s talk about Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is a Core Web Vital. Have you ever been reading an article and suddenly the text jumps down because an image finally loaded? It’s annoying. Google hates it. To fix this, you have to define the width and height attributes in your HTML.
<img src="design-tips.webp" width="1200" height="675" alt="Expert designer working on a tablet">
By telling the browser the aspect ratio ahead of time, it reserves the space. No jumping. Happy users. Better rankings. It’s a small technical tweak that separates the pros from the amateurs.
Designing for the "Click-Through"
Your thumbnail is your storefront. In the world of Discover and Image Search, your "how to make design" strategy must include high contrast. Google's official documentation explicitly mentions that non-promotional imagery—meaning images without huge "BUY NOW" buttons or intrusive logos—perform better in the Discover feed. They want content, not ads.
✨ Don't miss: Netflix Party Chrome Extension: Why It Is Still The Best Way To Watch Together
- Avoid heavy borders or "clickbaity" red circles.
- Embrace vibrant colors that contrast with the white or dark mode backgrounds of the Google app.
- Focus on human faces if relevant; humans are evolutionarily hardwired to look at faces.
I remember a case study from a niche tech blog that changed their featured images from generic screenshots to custom-illustrated 3D renders. Their Discover traffic increased by 400% in a month. It wasn't because the writing got better overnight. It was because the "packaging" finally matched the quality of the "product."
The Myth of "Pretty" vs. "Functional"
There’s this weird idea that SEO-friendly design has to be ugly or basic. That’s total nonsense. In fact, a "good" design that ranks is one that prioritizes the user's journey. If your layout is so "creative" that I can't find the menu or the text is too light to read against the background, I'm leaving.
Google tracks these "pogo-sticking" behaviors. If users click your result and immediately hit the back button because your design is a usability nightmare, your rankings will tank.
Contrast ratios matter. Check your colors against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). If your text-to-background contrast is below 4.5:1, you’re failing. Not just for people with vision issues, but for anyone standing outside in the sun trying to read your site. Good design is inclusive design.
Putting it All Together
If you want to master how to make design that ranks, you have to stop thinking of images as "decorations." They are data points. Every image should serve a purpose. It should either explain a concept, evoke an emotion, or provide a visual break in long-form content.
Don't forget about Open Graph tags. These are the snippets of code that tell social media and Google what image to show when your link is shared. If you don't set these, the platforms will just grab a random image from your sidebar. That’s a missed opportunity to control your brand's narrative.
Actionable Next Steps for Better Rankings
- Audit your current assets. Go through your top ten most important pages. Are the images at least 1200px wide? Are they in WebP format? If not, fix them today.
- Kill the stock photos. Replace them with screenshots, original photos, or even well-prompted AI images that you've heavily edited to match your brand's aesthetic. Google values uniqueness.
- Check your Core Web Vitals. Use PageSpeed Insights to see if your images are causing layout shifts. Add width and height attributes to your code immediately.
- Rewrite your alt text. Stop keyword stuffing. Describe the image as if you were talking to a friend over the phone who can't see the screen.
- Test your thumbnails. Look at your site on a mobile device. Is the featured image clear? Does it make you want to click? If it looks like a blurry mess, your audience thinks so too.
Success in Google Discover and Search isn't about gaming the system. It's about respecting the user's time and eyes. Provide high-quality, fast-loading, and relevant visuals, and the algorithm will eventually reward you. It takes work, sure, but the traffic from a single "viral" Discover hit can be worth more than a year's worth of stagnant rankings.