Speaker 1:
This presentation will introduce you to some key design principles for the purpose of helping you create visually engaging layouts for all kinds of texts.
While you may be creating specific designs for particular assignments in this course, these principles apply to any kind of text, either print or digital that you may be tasked with creating. These include webpages, social media posts, flyers, brochures, data visualizations, and even formal reports or proposals.
Visual harmony is a primary goal of visual design. Unified or harmonious designs create visual appeal and help audiences make sense of what they're looking at. You're probably familiar with this concept in your writing. Effective writing includes organizational and textual cues that help your audience understand and hopefully enjoy your message.
The goals for visual design are the same. Your design choices cue the audience into how they're supposed to read and interpret your text. What do you want them to notice first? How do you want them to move their eyes across the page? How will you reinforce the most important information? These are similar to the questions you ask yourself when composing most types of writing.
When creating visual designs, you have different tools at your disposal. Let's talk about some of those tools.
In contemporary culture, which is saturated in digital media, I'm sure you're likely to be familiar with some of these basic design principles, even if you've not really thought about the ways they encourage you to read and interpret visual information in certain ways.
First, let's review the most basic elements of design you have at your disposal. They include size, shape, and color. These elements are fundamental to how you create other important design features, such as alignment, contrast, emphasis, and proportion. Size, shape, and color are some of the simplest things to manipulate. You can choose a pleasing color scheme to create a tone or feel for your design. Text fonts are also easy to manipulate and utilize for certain effects. And increasing the size and shape of photos and other visual elements are basic ways to create emphasis.
Before we move on to looking at a few design principles in more depth, let's consider a note about fonts. It's easy to become overwhelmed by the number of font choices in most design software these days. Though fonts can be selected for decorative purposes, in most cases, you'll be manipulating font either for visual emphasis, such as through a headline, or to clearly communicate information. Strive for simplicity and consistency when selecting font. Using too many fonts or hard to read fonts are common errors. Try to select only one or two different fonts. Or stay within the options available in a font family. And remember, reading blocks of text online can be hard on the eyes. Keeping it clean and simple is helpful for readers.
Now, on to some other important principles. Let's talk about emphasis first, since you're often using other design principles for the purpose of emphasizing something. Emphasis is the part of the design that catches the viewer's attention. Often, it is the most important part of the message. Or emphasis helps people more easily read and understand your message. Visual emphasis tells you how to move your eyes across the page. Visual designers create emphasis by manipulating features, such as color, size, and shape.
Hierarchy is the arrangement of texts or objects to imply relative importance in a visual design. Hierarchy also tells you how to move your eyes across the page.
Objects in your design can also be used to create movement. Movement like hierarchy dictates the path the viewer's eyes take through the design to different focal points. Movement can be directed along lines, edges, shapes, and colors. Movement can make otherwise stagnant pages look more dynamic and visually interesting.
Contrast is the arrangement of opposite elements and effects. Obvious contrasts are between light and dark or bright and muted colors, but you can also use contrasting shapes, textures, lines, or other elements to increase visual interest. You can also use contrast to create emphasis, improve readability of digital texts.
Balance, like it sounds, is the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colors, and texture, or space on a page. A balanced design uses space judiciously, so objects, texts, colors, or other design features are spread evenly across the page. Manipulating balance is another way to create emphasis in your design.
A specific type of balance is symmetry, where both sides of a design mirror one another. If you cut a symmetrical design in half, both sides would be identical, both sides of a symmetrical design demand equal visual attention.
Proportion is a comparison of the relative size and quantities of certain design elements. Proportion can be manipulated for a variety of reasons. It can create emphasis, balance, and even realism as you represent the scale of objects, or it can exaggerate scale. Think of image enlarge to show texture.
What you're looking at here is the golden ratio or divine proportion, a mathematical representation of allegedly perfect mathematically precise proportion. Many have argued this proportion naturally repeats itself not only in the human face, but also in human creations and in nature as well.
Here is a look at it in architecture. Here's a look at it in nature. Can you see it here? How about here? Or here? These examples are not intended to make you think your designs must be mathematically precise, but it is important to know a lot of evidence suggests certain design patterns are more attractive to the human eye than others. Manipulating proportion then is an important way to aesthetically enhance your designs.
Repetition is the reusing of certain elements throughout your design to create unity, coherence, and to make your design seem like a cohesive whole. It can also help with comprehension, interpretation of information.
For example, consider how a textbook page layout consistently employs different colors for headings, subheadings, or activities. This helps you to mentally organize the information being presented to you on the page.
Pattern, a type of repetition, is created through repeating elements in a design, such as color, shape, or lines. Patterns are usually used to enhance visual interest in design.
Finally, there is nothing. White space, also known as negative space is empty space around the content on a page, and it's really important. Appropriate use of white space is critical for making sure you're not cramming too much on a page and visually overwhelming your audience. You can see how lots of extra white space is a simple way to create emphasis.
I hope this brief overview has introduced you to some useful design principles you can apply in your own work. Visual design skills are simply a must for 21st century writers, so it's a good idea to start practicing your skills. Now, the nice thing is there are plenty of resources for beginners online, and more and more simple to use applications to create visually appealing texts. Good luck.