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From the Inside to the Outside
Before considering formal issues such as layout, color, and
typefaces, think about who you want to speak to and what you want
to say. Once you're clear on these goals, an appropriate visual
solution can grow in response. Begin with a dissection of your project.
What is the subject matter? Who is your audience? What is the purpose?
Do some brainstorming on paper to answer these questions, and you
will be on your way to finding the appropriate voice for your design.
Subject + Audience + Purpose =
Voice Did you ever notice how your spoken voice and mannerisms
fluctuate depending on with whom you are talking? You may brighten
your tone and exaggerate detail when speaking to a child; deepen
and intensify it when angry; soften it while sharing a secret. These
instinctive responses remind us how much impact audience has on
our behavior. The same logic applies in a design context—in
order to communicate effectively, your design must speak with the
appropriate voice for your subject, audience, and purpose. For instance,
a big, crude font and crowded composition wouldn’t make sense
for a Zen tea house menu. Similarly, a slender, san-serif font composed
in a sparse field would fail to conjure the right feel for a pit
beef joint.
Getting Beyond the Familiar People, places,
thoughts, and things become familiar through repeated exposure.
For this reason, the first ideas that pop into your head are generally
ideas that you have experienced many times before. Take the time
to think beyond the familiar—your fresh ideas will pique and
hold people's attention.
Hierarchy Once you've decided
what you want to say, the first formal task is to determine a clear
hierarchy: that is, the order in which elements will be emphasized.
When design elements are too evenly weighted, the audience quickly
loses interest. This happens because the designer has not provided
clear visual cues to help readers navigate the content.
Designing a hierarchy is both an intuitive and logical
process. Like sound, elements that command our attention tend to
be louder, separating themselves by their emphatic quality or location.
Devices used to create emphasis include increased size, weight,
and color. The hierarchy enables each level of emphasis or respective
category (title, text, captions, images) to stand clearly apart
from every other category.
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Visual
Path Effective compositions often have a major focal point—typically an image, whether photographic or illustrative—that
appears larger and more emphatic than any other element in that
environment. To direct the viewer's eye through the design, carefully
distribute elements to create balance, tension, and movement.
White Space Have you ever
looked through a magazine and been struck by an almost empty page
with just one element on it? Like a whisper in the whir of noise
and shouting, a simple page catches our attention not by shouting
but by restraint. Think of white space as you do any visual element—notice
and control the shape, volume, and placement to add emphasis and
impact. Like good writing, the art of using white space involves
what’s left out as much as what’s left in.
Symmetry and asymmetry
are two strategies for achieving compositional balance. Symmetrical
design is oriented on a central axis: the right side is a mirror
image of the left. This technique lends stability and is often used
in more formal communications like wedding invitations and announcements.
Asymmetrical design is organic and achieves tension and order through
the uneven distribution and balance of type, images, and color in
space. Generally speaking, asymmetrical design attracts and holds
your audience’s attention longer because the visual relationships
are not optically predictable.
Contrast is among the most
potent tools a designer can use to create impact and emphasis. Types
of contrast are limited only by one’s imagination. To name
a few:
big/small
soft/hard
transparent/opaque
thick/thin
organic/structured |
tall/wide
in-motion/static
many/few
smooth/rough
color/monochromatic |
When you juxtapose an element with its opposite,
the inherent qualities of that element stand out more dramatically,
thereby increasing the overall dynamic of the design.
Images bring publications
to life. When you create or crop images, several principles will
help convey a stronger, clearer visual point-of-view. First, compose
or crop with an eye for bold, graphic form, high contrast, and clear
color. When denoting context, include only enough visual information
to establish that context. Showing part of a dog and not the entire
dog will still say dog, yet may make a more interesting image. Experiment
with scale— make something huge that's ordinarily tiny and
vice versa. Try capturing your subject from a surprising angle—
from above, undeneath, even inside out.
Color is a powerful communicator.
More than perhaps any other visual element, color can set the mood
or signal a subject area. Red is dynamic and often associated with
passion or violence; blue can be calm or authoritative (think jazz
and blue suits); green evokes the environment and health, and yellow
is optimistic and warm. Use color with discretion—one or two
colors can have more impact than many, and such restraint often
has the added benefit of being more economical to print.
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