Layout and Design
I was feeling a bit bored and suddenly remembered I have the “Graphic Design Rules” book sitting on my shelf and decided to pick it up.
As I was flicking through, I thought it would maybe be good to read a few of the pages about layout and design. I feel like you can never have enough knowledge about these things – especially at this stage in my career.
I decided to make a quick blog post to document a few things that stuck out to me when reading this chapter as I have found it very useful and interesting.
This book is also a really enjoyable read, as there is a lot of humour, and little life hacks throughout.
One of the first things that stood out to me was actually a heading on one of the pages:
Thou shall remember that type legibility differs wildly from print to screen.
A typeface like Times New Roman looks great in print, but horrible on screen. This is because screen legibility is most influenced by a typeface’s x-height.
This is something I had thought about before, because I noticed that some type isn’t as great in print than it is on screen – and vice versa!
However, I never knew the actual reason behind this.
The next thing I liked in this chapter was that it tells you that “Good design seduces the viewer”.
What they mean by this is that, if your layout and design is rubbish, it’ll repulse the viewer – and they will likely click off the site before even bothering to read the contents.
The book goes on to speak about designing with purpose.
If an element is purely decorative, and has no purpose – then it shouldn’t be there. We have been taught this already, but Sean Adams uses Coco Chanel as an analogy for this, and writes “When accessorising, always take off the last thing you put on”.
This is because LESS IS MORE.
A great concept can withstand any layout issues. If you find yourself making the same tiny adjustments, and going back and forth with it, but still not liking how it looks – then the chances are that the idea isn’t great.
This is something that I can have issues with because I often don’t like to abandon my ideas if I’ve begun moving on with them. However, Adams raised a very important point with this, and I think it’ll help me be able to change my plans and fix my ideas in the future.
The final thing I read (before the book went on to talk about logo design), was about adding random squiggles and lines to the design.
This is actually a pet peeve of mine – but also something that I used to find myself doing. Sometimes I would want to fill the white space (because of what I’d been taught in the likes of Media Studies at secondary school), but when I couldn’t figure out what to fill it with – I’d add a line 🤦🏼♀️.
Additive thinking in design is an issue. Dumping more lines and squiggles onto a boring design isn’t gonna make it any less boring, it’ll just add chaos. “Meaningless form is meaningless”.
I realise now that this has become an extremely long post, so I’m going to cut it off now.
I am really enjoying this book though, as I am learning more, but also giggling at the jokes an analogies included. There will likely be more posts about this book in the future as I read more chapters that’ll be relevant to the modules I will be working on.