While being cooped up at home, now may be a good time to hone your graphic design skills. For landscape architects and designers, urban planners, and architects who present work to the public or private clients, the fully revised Graphic Design Rules: 365 Essential Dos and Don’ts offers common sense design suggestions and up-to-date Photoshop tips that will improve your work. The book is written for those just getting started as a designer and expert communicators who want to refresh their approach.
Created by Sean Adams, chair of graphic design at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California; Peter Dawson, a typographical designer; John Foster, principal of the design firm Bad People Good Things; and Tony Seddon, a freelance designer and writer, Graphic Design Rules brings together different voices united in the goal of “assisting the designer with issues of craft through rules, suggestions, and methods.”
Adams, an American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) medalist, argues in the introduction that “the best thing about rules is that they often work best when broken.” We wouldn’t enjoy the well-spring of visual innovation — new fonts, layouts, or color schemes — if no one broke the rules. The trick is “when to follow the rules and when to ignore them.”
Graphic Design Rules is organized into sections on type and typography, layout and design, color, imagery and graphics, production and print, and then a final section on the practice of design. Each tip is on one to two pages and features a bright green signal indicating “Go for it,” and a red stop sign that signals “this should be avoided at all costs.”
Readers of the section on type and typography will learn never to use Comic Sans unless ironically. Times New Roman is boring but has its purpose. Zapf Dingbats should stay out of your designs. And the classic typefaces — Garamond, Helvetica, Futura — are classics for a reason.
The authors encourage you to nerd out and study typographical classifications. This kind of guidance is balanced with extremely practical advice like: “Don’t use any more typefaces in one layout than is absolutely necessary.”
The layout and design section delves into rules for organizing information that can apply to everything from a one-page PDF to a brochure, advertisement, webpage, or poster. Here, the authors exhort their readers to use a grid to maintain a layout’s structure, but also break out of the grid if the layout prescribes it. A few essential tips: “Do create a focal point for every layout” and “Do establish a visual hierarchy that leads to the most important information.” Creating layouts or designs in Microsoft or PowerPoint is verboten; learn and use design software.
Beginners will perhaps learn the most from the color section, which explains how colors are made — either from light or pigment — and how to work with them with tools like Photoshop. The authors get you to think critically about hue, saturation, and value (or brightness) and how they impacts designs. You can delve into the technical details of color spaces; how to synchronize your color settings across Photoshop applications, which is crucial for consistency; and the differences between RGB and CMYK.
Some important Dos: Colors need to have a reason for being; don’t just a select a color because you like it. It’s important to ask your client about color preferences, too. One brilliant suggestion is to look at the colors that surrounds you in the environment for color inspiration. “They will always remain in harmony and be unique to your experience.”
In imagery and graphics, you will learn why it’s important to avoid stock images, but to check stock image sites anyway because sometimes the perfect one could be hidden away on page 8 of a search result. The book suggests designers explore technical issues like file types and bit depth. There are tons of recommendations for how to crop, edit, and format images in Photoshop. “Do always apply some sharpening to digital images.” And they lay down the law with a recommendation like: “Don’t use Photoshop filters to disguise a low-quality image.”
A later chapter may only be of interest to those who are trying to faithfully present their designs in print format and want to get into the nitty-gritty of printing. And the practice of design explains how to stay true to yourself as a designer while doing your best for your client. One important tip: “Don’t present mood boards unless specifically asked – and even then.”