Design — What is it and how to get started?
The first step in learning to design should be learning to Observe.
Leading companies in every sector are making their designs better and more useful everyday. The following two amazing case studies introduced by Google and Uber can help you understand design techniques.
This article contains a lot of links to various case studies, helpful articles, videos, etc. Make sure to go through all of them for a better understanding.
You can start small by observing the logos of the apps/websites/devices that you use everyday.
As a small exercise, take a good look at all the logos that you can find around you.
The characteristics which make these logos beautiful is that they have symmetry ( may not be geometrically symmetric 😛 ), contrasting colors and beautiful fonts.
Let’s dive in to understand more about these 3 important pillars of design, viz. Color, Typography and Alignment.
Color
The first thing that comes to mind after hearing design, is always Color. Digital colors are just a mere combination of Red, Green and Blue, but they have a far more major role to play in any great design.
Be it a logo, graphic, an attractive poster, they all have a great color combination.
Have a look at some of the most famous color schemes. As a beginner you can create great looking designs by following these guidelines.
Material colors are bright and you imagine the colors to be coming at you. At the same time, the flat color scheme popularized by Microsoft is laid back and gives a calming effect.
Both of them are great in their own ways and have their unique usage guidelines.
Just try to mix colors from these two guidelines and see how the beauty of a design breaks down.
A color is represented generally via it’s HEX (Hexadecimal) code or RGB (Red, Green, Blue) code.
Black :
#000000, rgb(0, 0, 0)
White :
#FFFFFF, rgb(255,255,255)
Play this game to test your color code knowledge:
http://yizzle.com/whatthehex/
Typography
In very simple terms, typography is the art of displaying text.
A good typography can be read easily, can be uniquely associated with a brand and conveys information in a precise and beautiful way.
It consists of selecting meaningful typefaces (fonts), font-sizes, spacing, weight of the font.
Alignment
Now that the color and typography has been taken care of, alignment is the last step of arranging of the information systematically. A proper alignment helps to create a connection of separate pieces of your design.
Have you ever had difficulty in locating date/time on a poster quickly? It might well be a case of poor alignment.
Designing with a grid can automatically improve your design a lot.
“But, what about Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator that everyone keeps talking about? I have no idea how to use them. Why are you talking about this not-so-interesting stuff instead of talking about the softwares?”
Understanding these softwares without knowing about design principles, trends and techniques can be disastourours.
Photoshop vs Illustrator — What’s the difference?
Photoshop deals with raster graphics, while Illustrator is used to make vector graphics.
Raster Graphics (Common types: .jpg, .png) are made up of millions of pixels, where each pixel represents a specific color.
Vector graphics (.svg) on the other hand are just points (vectors) connected to each other, an enclosed portion of few points can be assigned a color.
On zooming in, raster Graphics may get pixelated while vector Graphics aren’t affected at all since they are just a combination of points. Therefore they can be scaled up/down as much as you want.
What should I start with — Photoshop or Illustrator?
I will suggest you to start with Illustrator as designing vector graphics can help clear many concepts about shape making, pen tool, anchor tool, curves, alignment, gradients.
When you are comfortable with these tools, you can move onto Photoshop in which mainly you’ll learn brush tool, masking, working with layers, etc.
Illustrator has really powerful tools that let you work with vector graphics, while Photoshop is useful for photo editing, poster designing, UI designing and much more.
However, the elements which you’ll have to use in Photoshop to make a design, have to designed in Illustrator first. Therefore, a sound knowledge of Illustrator will help a lot.
(If you are interested in UI designing, you can also try out Adobe XD.)
Once you are comfortable with tools, you can browse through thousands of great tutorial videos which will teach you how to create amazing effects.
I’ll highly recommend going through the following tutorials and channels:
- TastyTuts — Adobe Illustrator Course, Youtube.
2. TastyTuts — Adobe Photoshop Course, Youtube
3. Once you’re done with these two, Dansky’s tutorials are the way forward.
A few words to conclude,
You’ll get better by observing great designs, understanding how they are made and trying to implement them yourself.
I’ll advise you to try and get inspirations from all the designs you see. Maybe you can try to design a Whatsapp User Interface/Twitter Web Interface in Photoshop. You are free to improvise.
One doesn’t start creating original compositions while learning a musical instrument.
Design is not a lot different from music.
What should I do once I am off the beginner stage?
- Behance and Dribbble are great communities where you can publish your original designs/improvisations, you can see the work of other artists and get inspired.
- You can start freelancing and sell your designs. (Recommended)
- You can follow challenges like 100 Days Of Design to keep you in the loop.
- Build your own portfolio to showcase the great arts you have made.
Recommended:
- Surf the web searching for graphic design related articles and videos. Read various case studies of major brands.
- Keep up with the design trend by visiting and posting on Dribbble, Behance, Pinterest regularly.
- Don’t just limit yourself to designing one kind of stuff. Try out t-shirt designing, logo design, graphic design, interface designing, branding.
- You can read about Brand Identity Designing, it will always be an in-demand job.
- Read about Product Design, how to build interfaces which hook users up.
There is no limit to how much you can learn in graphic design. If you have an eye and intuition of good design, you can rise up the ranks pretty quickly.
I am Aayush Joglekar, an undergrad student at IIIT Allahabad. I am a full stack web developer and an avid designer.
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