so in today's video it's me tom satori the graphic designer that you either love or hate
going against canva which is something that most professional designers pretty much hate and the
first design that i'm going to try to improve with small but clever changes is this ice hockey poster
now i'm sure you have an eye for design so take a look at this artwork and think what could be
improved here for this design so in this example i think the main offenses are within the typography
and something i've spoken about before in this channel is the alignment of text when you have
certain letters or characters hanging off the edge of a line so if you look here you have the
t on the on the second main heading line the text is aligned to the left with the m above
and this is done automatically with something like illustrator now yes this is aligned technically
speaking but because the t has a kind of unusual shape visually speaking it's not aligned that
well when you consider the text below the main heading also notice the space between the main
heading and then the text below and then the text above the main heading we have a clear disharmony
and no logical sense here things are way too cramped below i also think the text is spaced out
too much in general and there's just too many kind of disjointed confused areas of typography
so i'm going to neaten things up a little bit and just make things more
user-friendly when looking at this poster design and as you can see i've decided to put some of the
main helpful or useful information in a black box with some color hierarchy as well this
clearly sets apart certain bits of information from other ones and in doing this we also have
more free space around the design in general i also have changed the alignment on the text
below the main heading as well as we discussed earlier sometimes using the alignment tools in
illustrator without checking if it looks good or not is not the best way to be going about things
okay so next up we have an album cover for a kind of acoustic artist now on canva there are so many
different categories and as soon as i saw album covers i kind of stormed in there to find an
example to work on and this design really stood out to me because in all fairness it is just so
bad there's no character to it it just seems really amateurish and also the typography is
illegible in some areas simply because black on gray or black doesn't work so let's pick apart
this design step by step and for my variation on this album cover i decided to use the image as
a whole for the whole design as opposed to having a white background space as well and then to give
some oomph and some character i chose han cf for the main typography solution and i put it into
the bottom left that i just felt that worked best as you can see the typography goes from the left
leading up the higher neck and then to add a focal point or some interest i decided to put sunday
in a different color and you could have used many different colors but i think blue especially baby
blue is kind of calming and that kind of works best for a sunday relaxing acoustic kind of vibe
and then of course adding in the other information setting up some balance i put the artist in the
top right corner and then finally just a little motif of an arrow suggesting turn left and also
using that blue once again so this design without knowing anything about the artist or anything
about his music i think this is a lot better than the original so one of the things i came
across whilst surfing around on canva is the fact that you can download or make use of full website
templates and i say website in inverted commas because they're pretty lame to be honest with you
if you are a website designer or your business that wants to set up a website i strongly
do not recommend that you use canvas built-in website function i saw this furnishings website
and i wanted to pick apart the home page the main issues here were the layouts were
centralized and it just doesn't match well i mean if you look at the interior design in the
furnishings everything is minimal it's clean and it's very very modern the main typeface i've used
for squirrels furnishings doesn't scream sleek it doesn't scream modern or minimal it's really bold
it's really loud it's really in your face i don't think this works that's the main thing i wanted to
change and then also i wanted to change the layout so i've gone ahead and shown you just everything
i've done on this design and i did add in a few more bits just to make it look more like a kind
of website homepage i've gone with a thinner sans serif font for the main heading and this does
match up with that minimal kind of modern sleek design and then for the call to action button at
the bottom that says shop now i've matched up a kind of peachy color from the table on the right
also i think this balance is really perfect for this design having the text on one side
and then the image on the other side so next up is a youtube thumbnail considering that you're
watching this on youtube you are someone who interacts with youtube on a regular basis probably
now if you're someone who's looking on youtube for suits or how to dress differently or dress better
would you be inclined to click on this thumbnail when talking about thumbnails
on youtube you need something that's really attention-grabbing you need something that
stands out from the crowd because people are going to be viewing countless and countless thumbnails
when they're browsing on youtube so it needs to be something that stands out and grabs our
attention and usually that's done with color but also you should avoid putting text in the bottom
right on a youtube thumbnail because that is where the timestamp telling you how long the video is
and especially on mobile this can kind of cover up the text so you can't even read it so what i did
is i kept with the black and white theme and then i put the text in the top left and i've done that
in a very bold and a yellow kind of square i've also gone with a more modern style of typeface and
something that isn't too stretched upwards there was a time and a place for a very tall sans serif
font and i don't think this was that time we all know how bad the situation is in india right now
the virus and i saw this design on canva and i thought i could make it a little bit better with
just a few tweaks or minor adjustments i really like the concept of having the colors of the
indian flag as the design but i want to go with a different kind of shape and a different approach
for the main concept also i want to change up the typography a tiny bit because i don't quite like
this typeface sure it kind of is reminiscent of india in some respects but i think for alerting
someone's attention about crisis it needs to be different so i've kind of taken the three colors
of the indian flag and i've almost made something that resembles a kind of a sunset and those
people watching it and i've changed the typography using again some hierarchy in size and also color
but do let me know which designs you prefer and if you agree with my changes in today's video
of course a lot of it is going to be subjective and just personal opinion but there are many
different rules in graphic design that lay the foundations for efficient design i've nearly
picked three winners or that nike trainer design i asked you to work on but yeah i will announce
those three winners in the next video now if you want to learn something else about graphic design
today do click the video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace
you