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A new and updated 3rd Edition of Rockport’s best-selling Design Elements, a visually rich and accessible handbook that presents the fundamentals of design in lists, tips, brief text, and examples. With new images and diagrams, the book covers everything from working with grids, color application, typography, and imagery to how to finally put it all together.
Features include:The ultimate primer on graphic design’s basic visual toolkit—dot, line, plane, texture, space, and contrast—and how these basics underpin all successful layoutsAn in-depth look at color—from its optical qualities and its effect on type to its potential for communication concepts and emotionsOne of the most thorough compilations of typography concepts to be found—including information on letterform structure and optics, combining typeface styles, the mechanics of detailed text typesetting, and using type as imageAn extensive overview of imagery—the endless possibilities of medium, depiction, abstraction, stylization, and how these all communicate effectivelyMethods for integrating type and image, including a tutorial on using grid systems to structure layoutsTwenty rules for making good design—and the best ways to break them
Being a creative designer is often about coming up with unique design solutions. But when the basic rules of design are ignored in an effort to be distinctive, design becomes useless. In language, a departure from the rules is only appreciated as great literature if recognition of the rules underlies the text. Graphic design is a “visual language,” and brilliance is recognized in designers whose work seems to break all the rules, yet communicates its messages clearly.
From the Publisher
What Is Graphic Design?
A graphic designer is a communicator: someone who takes ideas and gives them visual form so that others can understand them. The designer uses imagery, symbols, type, color, and materials (whether printed or on screen) to represent the ideas that must be conveyed; and to organize them into a unified experience that is intended to evoke a particular response.
FORM AND SPACE
First Things First Exchanging ideas through speaking and writing is familiar. Language works by naming ideas with sounds (words), ordered in ways we’ve somehow agreed will mean something. Design certainly involves writing (as type), but how it looks communicates as much as what it says: the type’s font and the words’ arrangement into shapes themselves convey ideas. That means purely visual material also works like written language. Images, even just shapes, “name” ideas; and we “read” their visual qualities and arrangement, their ordering, to understand “what to know” about them.
COLOR FUNDAMENTALS
What Color Is In the simplest terms, we experience color because light is one kind of electromagnetic energy, in the form of particles that move in waves, which does certain things when it hits physical objects. A given object’s chemical/ molecular make up absorbs some of the lights’ energy, but not all of it; the rest either bounces off the object’s surfaces (reflection) and often splits into multiple, differing wavelengths (refraction). The cells that line the backs of our eyes direct different wavelengths that enter our eyes along specific neural pathways to be individually interpreted by our brains; each color we see represents a very specific wavelength of light.
CHOOSING AND USING TYPE
The Nuts and Bolts The letters of the Western (or Roman) alphabet are built from a system of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and curved lines called strokes. They’re all similar enough in their shapes, proportions, and the ways they’re combined into letters to create a recognizable, consistent, visual logic (which is crucial for undistracted reading)—but just different enough so that every letter, or character, is easily distinguishable from the others. The strokes are only one part of a character’s form: the negative spaces, or counters, between and around the strokes of each character are the other part.
THE WORLD OF IMAGERY
Pictorial Images One clear option is to represent an idea pictorially by using photographs, illustrations (drawings or paintings), or a combination of these. Deciding which really depends on evaluating a project’s content and its conceptual needs. Pictorial images provide informational clarity, but evoke emotional, associational, and branded messages as well. A pictorial image’s fom may be expansive—intricate, detailed, and made up of many kinds of syntax, as is that of a photograph or detailed rendering; alternatively, it may be reductive—editing the syntax to include less, and fewer kinds. Expansiveness and reduction somewhat correlate to an image’s perceived naturalism (discussed on the following pages).
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Seeing Two Things As One Very simply, all design projects incorporate just two kinds of stuff: type and imagery. The big question, therefore, is “How do I put these two different things together?” Poor type/image integration creates one of two conditions: Either a state of separation and disunity, or one in which the type is so aggressively integrated that it becomes nonfunctional. Getting type to unify seamlessly with images is a serious challenge because of its persistent difference from everything else: Images exhibit a staggering variety of formal qualities, but type is always type: graphical lines and the patterns they make.
Publisher : Rockport Publishers; 3rd edition (September 8, 2020)
Language : English
Paperback : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 1631598724
ISBN-13 : 978-1631598722
Grade level : Preschool and up
Item Weight : 2.2 pounds
Dimensions : 8.05 x 0.95 x 10 inches