No matter who actually you are, a graphic designer, web designer, visualizer, concept developer, animator or layout artist. If you belong with word "Graphic Design", this is for you.
It's about the time when I was in initial stage of learning graphic design. For me it was all about experimenting and playing with colors. Starting with a white canvas in Adobe Photoshop and ending with an illusion, which can't be predicted correctly, what does it denote? But yet it was a designed graphic.
I still remember most of my great designs were actually started without any concept and were been conceptualized, after I finished them. I used to call it quality by mistakes.
This is not the story of me alone, infect this belongs with a thousands of new comers and some time even with professionals.
This article "One Lesson Book - The Graphic Design" is all about explaining the most critical and important factor to design a conceptualized & significant graphic for highly demanding corporate design world.
Graphic design is no more remains the art of playing with colors; it's a complete set of processes to follow.
1) Understanding Core Concept
Core concept is actually the message, which needs to be delivered to audience of your graphic. Better to call it subject of graphic. So before double clicking the icon of graphic editor, set a core message for your future graphic. Think what you need, your audience to know by this graphic. Then see your concept from customer point of view, are you getting what you want to show?
2) Visualizing
I believe the most critical factor to design a significant graphic is visualizing and designing the concept. Concept i.e. how will you deliver your message to your audience? Concept i.e. what single illusion will replace your 1000 words?
In this step you need to visualize the look and feel of your future graphic. You need to visualize the contents of graphic.
Let me take an example -
Once I have seen an advertisement of a car manufacturing company in a magazine. In graphic, they had placed a luxurious white color sofa on four wheels. Of course they wanted to show their customers, how much comfort the car delivers to rider.
This is an elegant example of getting the core concept ("Delivering Comfort") and visualizing a design ("Luxurious Sofa on Four Wheels").
3) Creating Value
Creating value means you have to visualize your design according to the value of product or value of brand. What I mean to say is you can't visualize a beggar signing a cheque by a Luxurious Parker Pen Or, you can't visualize a family sitting & smiling in a Red Ferrari Racing Car.
The brands have certain values and you have to design your graphic accordingly to maintain their brand value.
4) Sketching
Most of the designers love to skip this step, but this is again a very important section. Designing a sketch of your visualization before drawing the actual graphic, is like designing a demonstration model of a building, before actually building it.
It gives you a vision of what exactly the final graphic is going to come. You can better use your time enhancing the content placement and look & feel of graphic on a paper and even can make appropriate changes if something goes wrong here.
5) Layout Designing
Now you are 100% ready to make your hands dirty with the various tools of graphic design software to shape your imagination in actual form.
The profit of following all 4 steps above can be seen here, where you have a clear image in your mind that what exactly you want to create and how finally it will look.
There is a saying in management "it's always better to spend extra time when planning, instead of spending extra days in producing".
6) Final Touch
Now your visualized image is finally in your hands and now you are eager to show it to somebody, who can praise you for your new design but Wait.
This is the time to re-analyze the starting core concept and the final outcome. How far have you achieved? You will definitely give you 100 marks but let's have a cross check.
- Check if the size ratio of text and images is correct or not? Use small text size for sleekness and big text size for giving focus.
- Check if the colors you have used are kissing your eyes or not? Use combination of dark shades or light-dark shades rather then fully light colors.
- Check if you have placed a significant amount of text too to describe your core message or not?
- Check if there is any content missing?
Though there is no pre-defined mechanism available to judge the capabilities of a designer, but yes by following these certain steps you can advantage yourself in this fast paced competitive world, where you don't have enough chances to make errors and then correct them.
Author of this article Aryan, is from India based Web Technologies Company, COMPOSE Corporation.
COMPOSE is Web Solution Company offering Offshore Development Services, Web-based Enterprise Applications Development, E-Commerce Development, Intranet & Extranet Solutions, Application Development and Web Design & Development.
Website: http://www.compose.co.in Email: compose@thecompose.com
By Aryan Gupta
It's about the time when I was in initial stage of learning graphic design. For me it was all about experimenting and playing with colors. Starting with a white canvas in Adobe Photoshop and ending with an illusion, which can't be predicted correctly, what does it denote? But yet it was a designed graphic.
I still remember most of my great designs were actually started without any concept and were been conceptualized, after I finished them. I used to call it quality by mistakes.
This is not the story of me alone, infect this belongs with a thousands of new comers and some time even with professionals.
This article "One Lesson Book - The Graphic Design" is all about explaining the most critical and important factor to design a conceptualized & significant graphic for highly demanding corporate design world.
Graphic design is no more remains the art of playing with colors; it's a complete set of processes to follow.
- - Understanding Core Concept.
- - Visualizing
- - Creating Value
- - Sketching
- - Layout Designing
- - Final Touch
1) Understanding Core Concept
Core concept is actually the message, which needs to be delivered to audience of your graphic. Better to call it subject of graphic. So before double clicking the icon of graphic editor, set a core message for your future graphic. Think what you need, your audience to know by this graphic. Then see your concept from customer point of view, are you getting what you want to show?
2) Visualizing
I believe the most critical factor to design a significant graphic is visualizing and designing the concept. Concept i.e. how will you deliver your message to your audience? Concept i.e. what single illusion will replace your 1000 words?
In this step you need to visualize the look and feel of your future graphic. You need to visualize the contents of graphic.
Let me take an example -
Once I have seen an advertisement of a car manufacturing company in a magazine. In graphic, they had placed a luxurious white color sofa on four wheels. Of course they wanted to show their customers, how much comfort the car delivers to rider.
This is an elegant example of getting the core concept ("Delivering Comfort") and visualizing a design ("Luxurious Sofa on Four Wheels").
3) Creating Value
Creating value means you have to visualize your design according to the value of product or value of brand. What I mean to say is you can't visualize a beggar signing a cheque by a Luxurious Parker Pen Or, you can't visualize a family sitting & smiling in a Red Ferrari Racing Car.
The brands have certain values and you have to design your graphic accordingly to maintain their brand value.
4) Sketching
Most of the designers love to skip this step, but this is again a very important section. Designing a sketch of your visualization before drawing the actual graphic, is like designing a demonstration model of a building, before actually building it.
It gives you a vision of what exactly the final graphic is going to come. You can better use your time enhancing the content placement and look & feel of graphic on a paper and even can make appropriate changes if something goes wrong here.
5) Layout Designing
Now you are 100% ready to make your hands dirty with the various tools of graphic design software to shape your imagination in actual form.
The profit of following all 4 steps above can be seen here, where you have a clear image in your mind that what exactly you want to create and how finally it will look.
There is a saying in management "it's always better to spend extra time when planning, instead of spending extra days in producing".
6) Final Touch
Now your visualized image is finally in your hands and now you are eager to show it to somebody, who can praise you for your new design but Wait.
This is the time to re-analyze the starting core concept and the final outcome. How far have you achieved? You will definitely give you 100 marks but let's have a cross check.
- Check if the size ratio of text and images is correct or not? Use small text size for sleekness and big text size for giving focus.
- Check if the colors you have used are kissing your eyes or not? Use combination of dark shades or light-dark shades rather then fully light colors.
- Check if you have placed a significant amount of text too to describe your core message or not?
- Check if there is any content missing?
Though there is no pre-defined mechanism available to judge the capabilities of a designer, but yes by following these certain steps you can advantage yourself in this fast paced competitive world, where you don't have enough chances to make errors and then correct them.
Author of this article Aryan, is from India based Web Technologies Company, COMPOSE Corporation.
COMPOSE is Web Solution Company offering Offshore Development Services, Web-based Enterprise Applications Development, E-Commerce Development, Intranet & Extranet Solutions, Application Development and Web Design & Development.
Website: http://www.compose.co.in Email: compose@thecompose.com
By Aryan Gupta
Superb one, thanks for posting.
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