I’m Michael Shumate and welcome to Logo Design Theory. Today, let’s talk about Basic
Principles of Graphic Design, because they have a direct bearing on branding design.
We live in a graphic savvy culture. Design infuses everything from
the gadgets we use to communicate and play, to the clothes we wear,
to the bottles our shampoo comes in. Every every ad in every magazine, every brochure
we pick up, every commercial on TV is designed. It is said that the average person now is
exposed to more than 3,000 images a day. We are almost force-fed images all day, every
day. But just because we eat every day doesn’t
mean we know how to cook. Adobe Creative Cloud apps (Photoshop, Illustrator,
InDesign, etc.) have been downloaded an astounding 376 million times (and that’s just as of
2020). Besides that, there is other graphics-capable software in use today.
∆ Many users have no design training. Even those with formal training don’t necessarily
know what they’re doing. Many schools now focus curriculum more on software and less
on design principles. People who know only the programs, not design, are sometimes hired
to teach new generations of graphic designers. The result? Graphic design graduates with
a lack of good grounding in their field. Because of this, bad design abounds. In opposition
to the tide of design illiteracy, let’s agree on four basic principles.
Principle #1: Simplicity is the Soul of Good Design
Beginning designers often get to a stage in a project where they sense that the design
is not working and ask themselves, “What else does this need?” More often
they should be asking, “What do I need to delete?” This is especially
true with corporate identity design. The best identities are simple and are all
the more memorable and effective for it. Principle #2: Computers Don’t Design for
You It has long been a dream to plug computers
directly into our brains. But even if we could, it would still be necessary to know what our
end product should look like before we could design it.
At the beginning of my career, I and other graphic designers made our master logos with
pen and ink. Now, we use a vector computer program. It
is the tool of choice in branding design. These programs offer capabilities that cannot
be duplicated by hand, but they still need our know-how to work. Computers don’t design
on their own, in the esthetic sense. Generally speaking, computers don’t do what
we want them to do. They do what we tell them to do.
It’s up to us to know which shapes, sizes, relationships and colors will work.
I call this Visual Knowledge. If we don’t have that Visual Knowledge, the computer can’t
supply it. Computers supply mathematically-based processes, not knowledge.
A computer won’t tell you if your shapes are esthetically mismatched. A computer can
tell you what size your elements are, but it doesn’t know if those sizes are appropriate
together. That’s your job. In the end, if you can’t draw, you can’t
draw on the computer. If you can’t design, you can’t design
on the computer. Early in my teaching career, I taught a course
called Graphic Techniques. It covered many difficult esthetic and manual skills that
graphic designers used to need. One of my students was on the brink of failing.
He begged me to let him have the benefit of the doubt. “I’m a whiz on the computer,”
he said. “You’ll see.” He barely passed that course, and when we got to the computer-based
design, his work was horrible. His designs were all techno-crap. The lesson: computers
don’t supply esthetics. Principle #3: Beware BYC Design
As I said, when I began graphic design, we didn’t use computers. If we wanted a gradient
in a design for an ad or for a layout in a magazine, there were two ways to get it.
1. We hired an airbrush artist to paint the gradient,
then had it photographed, photo-separated and spliced into plate negatives
by a photoengraver. or
2. We could have the photoengravers (if they knew how) make the gradients directly. Either
way, some of the control was relinquished to the airbrush artists and photoengravers.
In both cases gradients were so expensive, they were seldom worth squandering the design
budget on. Nowadays there are very few airbrush artists (good thing, too; with all the heavy-metal
pigments in the air, this was a hazardous profession). Today most airbrushing is done
in Photoshop. Today also, the whole profession of photoengraving
has almost vanished. Our designs don’t have to be photographed and the negatives stripped
together to be exposed onto printing plates. Now, everything goes from the computer directly
to plates without anyone having to make color separations (which used to be expensive in
their own right) or stripping together and registering the separate negatives from which
to burn the printing plates. Some of those processes that used to be so
expensive are easy to do now; the only thing they cost today’s designers is the trouble
of clicking a certain button. That has created an epidemic of BYC Design.
And what does BYC mean? “Because You Can.”
That is an extremely shallow reason for doing something. Sadly, when it’s the designer’s
main reason, the design almost always suffers. Principle #4: Beware JTBD Design Only slightly
better than BYC design is JTBD Design, “Just to Be Different.” (Given the moral of this
story, this kitschy type ∆
Not that novelty is a bad thing. It’s great if it doesn’t cause other problems like
bad legibility, poor reproduction, or greater costs for the client (remember, not acting
in the client’s best interest is inherently unprofessional). Measured against the possible
downsides, novelty alone can be a poor bargain. Next we’ll get to some design principles
you can really buy into. For more information, go to LogoDesignTheory.com.
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