BYU-I: Intro to Graphic Design
You can read this article to give you a better idea of what you would learn and practice if you take Introduction to Graphic Design as of Winter 2023. If you are not able to take the class, you may be able to gain some of the learning from here if you practice the exercises which closely match what you would be doing each week in class.
Album Cover
Constraints:
- Use only simple shapes: square, circle, triangle, rectangle, line.
- Abstract non-representational
- Dynamic
- Full range of values
Week 1:
In this class you will use Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. This is the trifecta of tools used for most graphic design work. How do you determine which tool is most appropriate for your task? Here is some food for thought.
- Illustrator is a design tool used for creating illustrations using complex shapes.
- InDesign is a design tool used for publishing. Once you have any images or illustrations you need created you can transfer them here for use in a formatting similar to a book or calendar. There is a wide range of applications for this tool.
- Photoshop is a design tool used for editing photos using raster graphics which is based on a grid of pixels and does not scale well. This means photos you use must be at least 300 DPI for it to not look pixelated on print. 72 DPI is okay for web based projects. You can add blur, crop images, combine images, mutate hue, saturation, and brightness, and much more.
In the end you can use any of the tools for a task but based on this knowledge you can identify which is better suited for the task. The album project will make the most sense using Illustrator.
Applying relevant Design principles is key to effective design. The reading categorizes the principles as Unity & Variety, Emphasis, Depth, Visual Pace, Scale and Proportion, and Balance.
The assigned reading for the class is Go by Chip Kid. Graphic design is problem solving by making things look cool. The complex way to say this is “purposeful planning that uses any combination of forms, pictures, words, and meanings to achieve one's goals.” This kind of communication requires the viewers active attention rather than engineering designs like the speed bump. To get the viewer attention you need a accurate understanding of the problem including what the target audience is looking for and and what the customer is requesting. It usually takes many designs to reach something that solves the problem. It helps to have a practical understanding of design thinking.
You should do as many thumbnails as you need in order to have 3 designs you are interested in moving forward with. We were asked to make these by listening to the song and interpreting the song into elements to convey the emotion or message of the song.
Exercise: Thumbnails, word map, word list
Week 2:
After having your thumbnails critiqued select 3 thumbnails to create further iterations off of.
Lets evaluate the thumbnails above. None of them are going to look like flawless works of art as they are only meant to expand your options and improve your use of design principles. Each thumbnail should take less than 1 minute. Some of the thumbnails are boring and others are chaotic. I tried to select thumbnails that seemed to best fit the song “Twilight Time.” I felt they also had adequate depth, unity, emphasis and visual pace.
Tutorial: To get a good color scheme you can visit color.adobe.com, click explore, and add the scheme to the library. From the CC library in InDesign you can click and add colors to selected elements.
Exercise: Thumbnail refinement
Week 3:
Keep at least a 10% difference in value. Have appealing positioning of elements using the rule of thirds.
Tutorial: Effective typography matches the feeling of the design elements it accompanies. You will need to experiment with different placement such as by using a grid, boldness, bars, spreading text over lines, different fonts or cases.
Ask yourself the following questions: What text belongs together? Which text is most important? How important is this text compared to the composition? What type of audience are you trying to attract?
Exercise: Digital sketches, color variations, typography
Week 4:
Tutorial:
Scale Stroke — Edit > Preferences > General > +Scale Strokes & Effects
Bleeds — File > Document Setup > Bleed = 0.125. Hit Okay. Expand elements to align with the bleed(red line).
Combining process books — Pages > Right click any page > Move Pages. Select the pages you want to move and which opened file to move your pages to.
Exercise: Finalize design
Logo
For more on the logo creation process see this article.
- Week 1: Concept + Research + 35 Symbol Sketches
- Week 2: 30 Logo Sketches + 3 Unique Digital Directions
- Week 3: Improve all 3 directions + Color + Type
- Week 4: 3 Options on 1 Logo + 1 Final Due
Tutorial: Pen tool to create a butterfly silhouette.
Click to create a point, click again to draw a line to that point. Click and drag to curve the line. Hold shift to keep the line vertical or horizontal. Hold down on the Pen Tool icon to see a list of tools to help you work with the pen.
Mirroring — Reflect tool(behind rotate tool) > click to create axis point > click to reflect across axis
Exercise: Create symbol sketches combining mascot and topic.
Alignment
Under properties you will find align tools. If you do not see this tool you can do a search for align or find it under the windows dropdown. Use this tool to align and create the right amount of space between elements.
Font
There are 3 types of fonts: serif, sans-serif, and slab-serif. To choose a good font for the work consider the way each font makes you feel and how cohesive they are to the work you are trying to create.
If you choose to use more than one font you will want to also matches mood with the other font. Often one font is used through out and another one is accent to draw attention to specific parts such as headers. There are many ways to play with typography such as letter spacing, negative space, size, similar mood, contrast, color, weight, detail, all caps/small caps/lowercase, extended/condensed, font, and layout. You should stay within 2–4 of these differences if you use more than one font. Limit the pair to 3 different styles. Adobe fonts and Google fonts are a good starting place. Fontsinuse helps you identify fonts for formats and topics. Fontsinthewild can help you decide by showing you how the fonts are already being used. For accessing unusual characters you can use wolftype. If you need to add type from a different language such as Chinese you need to find a font that has that character in it and find a way to paste it in. There are also many fonts you should never use such as papyrus and comic sans.
Colors themselves do not have emotions but are commonly associated with specific feelings depending on the context they are in.
If you want to edit the shape of text in Illustrator you can also convert it to outlines. This also works with creating shapes from overlapping text.
You can get certifications to test your knowledge of adobe tools. There are lots of cools videos on how to do things but the most important part is just creating your own work and putting your best into a portfolio others can see.
Poster Project
Like other designs you will want to sketch out as many ideas as possible. My first couple of digital designs were very rough but after critique and reflecting on how they were handling design principles I was able to come up with better designs. Type that does not read left to right normally does not work well for most languages.
