Design for Design’s Sake

Published in

The Startup

7 min readApr 11, 2018

An autodidactic exercise in branding

The principles elaborated upon, here, might mark your foray into the fascinating realm of graphic design. But you must reject them.

In 1891, WKL Dickson aspired to capture the world as realistically as possible. Through the first motion picture camera, the mission was to animate still images to do for the eye what a phonograph does for the ear.

The year is 2018, and, while shorter attention spans trigger our bingeing habits, we are witnessing the rise of graphic design. A field as promising as cinema was to the early pioneers of visual communication.

Graphic design is an extensive form of visual messaging that operates through images, text and symbols. This article attempts to develop the context within which you might be able to situate your skills as a designer.

To leverage digital marketing and communication efforts, Adobe, a leading facilitator, has released a series of design software. Marketers are enabled to accomplish their goals through everything from a poster for a sponsored Facebook ad to a product’s UI/UX.

But, before you set out on this visual journey, know that you don’t need to be an artist to be a designer. Anyone can make content shareable. What you need is a fair idea of your target audience, and what might or might not work for them.

Beyond that, a tastefully streamlined communication strategy is crucial. You need to think like an editor to make your audience seamlessly infer what you are presenting in a limited amount of time and space.

1) Field layout

Figure out the shape of your visual field. If you are designing a piece for social media marketing, you will be provided with content specifications. Basically everything from dimensions to the copy.

Think small, and focus on negative space. It’s important to provide the eyes with enough room to wander, and allow the information to flow from top to bottom, and left to right.

Limit the text to a minimum to allow for maximum impact.

2) Typography

The style and overall appearance of text depends on your choice of font, its size, colour, and weight. This is basically what typography is all about. As you explore the range made available to you by the chosen design software, remember that less is more.

You need to exercise some discretion while opting for a font that perfectly suits the style of your communication. Try and stick to one or two fonts, but don’t hesitate to diversify – depending on the communication goal of your project.

You must be familiar with the most commonly used font – Serif. It appears in editorial pieces, in contrast to Sans Serif, which is without the curved edges around the letters. The latter suits a more formal style of communication, because it brings more clarity with it.

Avoid fonts that are simply too casual or flimsy, like Comic Sans (pfft).

3) Colour theory

Colour will play a vital role in drawing attention to your design. It sets the mood almost instantly.

Notice the minimalism in the Instagram posts for a shoe brand below. The field of layout is clean, and the objects are organized for crisp and clutter-free communication. The brand messages are implicit. But it is the choice of colour that defines the contrast between the font, the image and the background of the field

Once you figure out the brand identity, plunge right into the colour wheel. After plenty of trial and error, you will learn to vary the degree of hue, saturation and value to create shades that achieve the right mood for your design.

4) Balance and alignment

By now you must have noticed how design is primarily populated by shapes. Whether fonts, symbols or images, these shapes need to exist in state of balance or perfect harmony. The easiest way to achieve it is by getting the alignment right.

Symmetrically splitting the field is a good place to start. Place a grid over your initial layout to viably distribute the weight of the objects. This will enable you to create order, before you deep dive into other details. The key is to consistently build and ease tension in the overall appearance of your design.

Created by the Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, Apple designs ensure that the layout of the screen isn’t obscured by the device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or the indicator that allows access to the Home screen.

Once the landscape and portrait dimensions are in place, other aspects like aspect ratio come into the picture. Symmetry is maintained to avoid distracting the viewer from the central message.

In some cases, there is a need for asymmetrical balance. Some objects deliberately need to pop in comparison to the rest. This can be done particularly when the communication isn’t specific to the target audience, or when unconventional ideas need to be conveyed.

The Homegrown poster below features the Indie electronic artist, Arman Menzies (aka Zokhuma). Apart from the image, notice how the arbitrary placement of ‘x’ and the random lettering in Hindi disrupts the announcement of the HG’s street festival. The brand clearly caters to iconoclastic ideas.

Their brand goal is to represent artists who push the boundaries that define narrow cultural identities and stereotypes in India.

5) Colour and contrast

Your choice of colours is integral to establishing the mood and appeal of your design. As explained earlier, you must start with the colour wheel and simply experiment before you find harmony.

Apple’s Iphone X blurs the boundary between device and display to create a seamless user experience. The innovative blend of both hot and cold colours forms the crux of its new-age appeal. With just a glimpse, there seems to be a subconscious sense of authenticity that is actually the outcome of a hard-selling marketing strategy.

Contrast is the next important principle that lets you figure out which object ultimately matters in your design, while adding emphasis. Two design elements need to be in opposition with each other for this to work: like a big font size against small, black against white, thick opposed to thin, modern to traditional, etc. It is what effectively organises the information conveyed by the objects.

6) Hierarchy

Hierarchy is the first crucial technique that helps the viewer absorb the crux of your communication before everything else. In other words, it shows the viewer where to begin and where to end, while focusing on the most crucial piece of information.

You should generally place the main text in a way that emphasises its centrality. The remaining objects and text can follow.

But this is not a hard and fast rule. In fact, most designers would go against the rules of composition when it comes to hierarchy.

It is true that information flows best from left to right, and top to bottom. The use of negative space, moreover, reinforces the notion that uncluttered layouts make for the best designs. But, as you progress onto discovering just how subjective composition can be, the rules might actually turn into techniques as per the communication goal of the project.

The advertisement below is designed by LOWERS INC. It is more in the vein of an abstract Andy Warhol, who once broke all popular conventions with his art. Notice how the designers have focused on conveying unique implicit perspectives through their choices. The coffee brand, Howlt, is still very much in focus, but the rigid sense of hierarchy is absent.

7) Proximity and space

Observe how proximity and space go hand in hand, while supporting this planned division. Proximity is what groups unrelated elements together to create a solid association between them. But the negative space around is most crucial to concretising this association.

Always remind yourself of the audience, and make sure that the communication is as transparent as possible. And always make sure to be concise with words. While posting on social media as well, the description should be posted as the status update rather than clogging the banner with text.

Intuition plays a huge role in determining visual communication. It is built through practice and persistence, along with constant iteration and reiteration. Make sure to refer to other designs for inspiration. Observation is key. And a good place to begin would be to replicate the designs that appeal to you most.

You will be exposed to many more basic conceptual tools. Your ultimate goal, then, is to internalise but, possibly, reject them before initiating your own creative process.

The process of design evolves over time, and you’ll have to be patient.

There are several roads a designer can take to establish a career in the field. This could be your first step toward transitioning from a non-designer to a content marketer, product or editorial designer, or a motion graphics artist.

I am currently inspired by senior designer Danish Ahmed’s BookMyShow UX case study, and Julia Potato’s Beehance portfolio. Remember that you will need to build your own portfolio in time.