W1.1 First class & Setting up the Blog.
- Sara Gravemaker
- Feb 3, 2017
- 2 min read
Today was our first design class, which was where we were assigned to start this blog to track our progress. Our first class was very useful, especially since I went into this with little experience in photoshop or other programs. We were introduced to some useful concepts such as the golden ratio and the rule of thirds. She also introduced us to concepts about colour contrasts, symmetry versus asymmetry, and rhythm. We were told that grids were very useful in starting out any design. However, we were not expected to just put a picture in the middle, I learned that it is more visually pleasing when an image is formatted in such a way that the interesting visual is at crossing points of the grid. Such as is shown here:
The cheetah is placed to the right at intersecting points. Seeing as we (Westerners at least) read from right to left, the positioning of the animal is strategic and makes the visual more pleasing and effective. This positioning is thus called the rule of thirds and very useful in graphic design.
Another such method, which is similar to the rule of thirds is the Golden Ratio. This concept basically states the same; that there is a certain point where the human eye is most likely to fall first. And therefore in order to optimize this natural point of attraction, one can utilize this in designs, following the following spiral:
Your eye lingers longest at the centre of the spiral, which makes it most useful to position important information at the centre of the spiral. Having the dates or the name of the product you're promoting there might be wise.
After this introduction to graphic design we were introduced to the program InDesign, which did not work, so instead we worked with Adobe Illustrator. She showed us some of the key tools of illustrator and asked us to play around with it for a bit. However, soon Illustrator stopped working too. However, we did learn the main tools and features of Illustrator. As homework we were assigned to make five pages of poster-designs which we think are inspirational, and to play around with grids, colours and page lay-out in InDesign.
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