How to Ensure Best Practices in Your Visuals

I've had a lifelong interest in creating aesthetically pleasing things, and continue to work at learning and growing in this area. While my degree is in broadcasting, I've worked in image-building much of my career and have had numerous experiences in print layout and design.

Information Everyone Can Use

I noticed something interesting once most people began doing their work on computers: we all have times when best practices in our visuals would serve us well, and especially now--in this age of social media and apps galore--when there are more tools out there to help us communicate better visually than ever before. The tendency I see in novice designs is often either a very vanilla lack of anything visually appealing or the opposite--an over-designed look that jars the eye. That's why I thought this would be a good time to blog about key things to consider when working in the graphic design arena.

The Four Main Elements of Graphic Design

In her book, The Non-Designers Design Book, Robin Williams does a nice job of simplifying the main elements of graphic design: contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity (remember C.R.A.P. and your designs won't look like crap!). If you're interested in seeing great examples illustrating each concept, I highly recommend this best-selling author. She writes with humor and levity, which makes learning fun!

Contrast

If we look at each element separately, contrast is simply making elements stand apart from one another visually, whether it be a headline from an article or subheadings within the article (as shown in this blog), or graphic elements in a logo, or a focal point of a flyer, or different pieces of a web page, etc. Contrast simply means if you're going to make things different from one another, make them very different for visual clarity.

Repetition

If there are like things in a design project, make them all the same. The subheadings of this article, for example, are all in the same font, bolded and in the same point size, adding visual clarity and making an easier map for reading.

Alignment

Imagine an underlying grid which shows ways elements of a design can relate to one another. A good rule of thumb is to have an element line up with at least one or two other elements in the design, again creating clarity and unity which is most appealing to the eye. In this article, everything is left-justified, or lines up along the left side of the page, so your eye knows right where to go to read the next line.

Proximity

The distance between elements in a design is also key. If you're creating a business card, for example, similar information like the address, phone and email may be single-spaced in a block together. However, a logo, tag line, quote or other non-data information might be set apart in some way, again for visual clarity and readability.

If you start looking at visuals with these key elements in mind, you'll begin to quickly see what makes for stronger design, and have fun incorporating them into your own work. Here's a recent business card I created with these elements in mind. Can you find these four elements?

Whatever you're creating--even a simple report--can be improved with these quick tips. If you have other ways you like to ensure clean strong designs, please feel free to share them in the Comments section below. I'd love to hear from you!

Today's Quote:
"I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things."
-- Lindon Leader