Most people, when they hear you’re a designer, they immediately think, wow! That person’s job is so high-end, so high profile, so promising! Designer! The feeling of cow force coax…… Do you? I’m sorry to say that I feel the same way. I think designers are very powerful. Every day, they drive their cars and have a cup of coffee, wear high heels of well-known brands and carry 16-inch high MacBook Pro laptops to work. Top Design believes that although being a designer is a very noble and stylish profession, we should always return to the essence of work when working.
Back to the whole: How to design, to design well
First of all, let’s talk about what design is. Only by understanding what design is, can we think of ways to do a good job in design. Design is the process of conveying an idea, idea and concept through reasonable planning, thorough planning and various forms of feeling. Through labor, human beings transform the world, create civilization, and create material and spiritual wealth. The most basic and important creative activity is creation. Design is the planning of creation activities in advance, and the planning technology and planning process of any creation activities can be understood as design.
One of the main goals of design is innovation, the other is innovation, and the third is to better improve the quality of life.
Highlight: How to design well
How to design well, these points you must pay attention to! Take visual graphic design as an example.
First, the consciousness of layout design
Simply put, layout design is typesetting, which is an important part of graphic design. When we look at a poster, we will notice the distribution of the whole layout at first glance, which is the power of layout. However, when we make posters or PPT by ourselves, we tend to ignore the layout design and focus on the title or beautiful pictures. This book tells us that a good typography will make your work more attractive to read.
Imagine that when you pass by the street, a junior high school student hands you a leaflet, you take it and glance at it. How do your eyes move and what part of you read it? How do you know what it probably sells? How long did it take you to find the contact information? Which part of the flyer did your eye linger on the longest? If you train yourself to look at things in life with a sense of problem, you will develop a designer’s eye:
Designers often ask themselves: What leaflet does a reader dread most?
In this book, the author tells us through a story about the Joshua Tree: “Once you can name something east and west, it is easy to pay attention to it. You will master it, you will own it, you will control it.” So you need to develop a sense of typography, and you need to develop a designer’s vision before you start designing.
Ii. Design principles
In his book Beyond Ordinary Typography, John Mcwade says that design should meet three requirements: beauty, simplicity, and clarity. Beauty mainly refers to the image part, conciseness mainly refers to the text part, and clarity refers to the unified arrangement of image and text typeset part. How to efficiently organize information and convey information is the purpose of clarity, which is also the main content of the four principles of design that we are going to talk about today:
1. Contrast: If two items are not exactly the same, they should be different, and they should be very different. 2. Repetition: Some elements of the design need to be repeated throughout the work, so that the work can maintain the unity and echo of the style. 3. Alignment: No elements can be placed randomly on the page. Each item should have some visual connection to something on the page. 4. Intimacy: The more logically related the elements, the closer they should be visually. Visually separate unrelated elements.
These four design principles to achieve the effect of two: enhance the visual impact, attract reading; Helps organize information, helps understand.
Contrast: If two items are not exactly the same, they should be different, and they should be very different. To be effective, contrast must be strong, never timid. Otherwise, if two elements are different, but not completely different, then it is likely to become neither coordination nor contrast, but conflict. The kinds of contrasts you can use include fonts, colors, lines, spacing (word spacing, line spacing, etc.), materials, graphics, etc.
Repetition: Repetition can be seen as consistency, the repetition of certain elements that make us understand that they belong to the same design. Avoid repeating an element too much; too much repetition can be annoying.
Alignment: Each item should have some visual connection to something on the page. You can’t have an element that looks like it’s just “hanging” there. First, any page has an external box line, which is the baseline for alignment. Second, both ends and center are conservative and boring. Try other alignments, but try not to mix them on the same page. Alignment can be broken, but only when alignment is obvious, to allow occasional breaking of alignment rules (i.e., the alignment of internal elements is flexible based on the alignment baseline).
Intimacy: human eyes will always unconsciously regard a group of content related to location as a whole, that is, a visual element, and the design is to comply with people’s habit of putting the location of relevant content together to make it a visual element. Don’t clutter the page with too many isolated elements. When designing a page, you may wish to divide 2-7 blocks according to the level of information, and different blocks should have a clear interval and comparison.
Three, other knowledge points
After introducing the core design principles, the author also talked about three aspects of knowledge:
1. Color knowledge (three primary colors, three primary colors, color wheel, color mode, etc., relatively brief)
2. Types of common printed matter and their design considerations (name card, menu, envelope, web page, etc.)
3. Font knowledge
Among them, font knowledge is emphasized, font is very important, it is the basic module to build all pages, to be able to use font correctly in design, is very important, including the font size, shape, thickness, direction, color and so on the difference between the use.
There are several types of fonts:
1. Oldstyle: Based on handwriting, strokes with varying thickness (diagonal emphasis), and slanted serif. Suitable for large amounts of text.
The thickness of the strokes is too strong and the serif is horizontal, suitable for headings.
3. Slab serif: Evolved on the basis of “Modern”, with excessive thickness not obvious, but still very mechanical.
A Sans serif font with strokes of no excessive thickness.
A style of writing, such as a signature.
It is very interesting but not suitable for reading a Decorative style.
Conclusion:
First of all, determine what you want users or readers to see most, what visual elements resonate? Create a visual center from the user’s or reader’s point of view; Group information logically so that users or readers can see at a glance; Next, identify repeatable elements to emphasize over and over again; Finally, introduce appeal presentation to make a difference in your design.