v1.1 November 2021
The
CONDENSED INTELLIGENT DESIGNER Graphic design manual
by
@antimofm
Copyright © 2020 by Antimo Farid Mire 978-1-5272-6078-8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 creative commons This book is licensed under a Creative Commons International License (cc by-nc-nd 4.0). This means you are free to share, copy and redistribute it, in any medium or format, under the following terms: attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests I endorse you or your use. noncommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. noderivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, but you may not distribute the modified material. Set in PMN Caecilia® Sans and Paralucent
The
CONDENSED INTELLIGENT DESIGNER Graphic design manual for startups, freelancers & small businesses
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. herman melville, Moby Dick (1851)
index
7
Brief Theory
Ideas Keys Principles
10 14 24
Practice
Content —— List —— Visualisation —— Hierarchy Form —— Colour —— Shape —— Motion How to Finish, or How to Overcome Creative Block
34 35 36 37 38 39 41 43
Paper Grids Typography Colour Software —— Illustrator —— Photoshop —— InDesign —— xd
54 55 59 70 79 81 83 85 87
Tools
46
90
Handoff
On index pages like this, you can tap the section you want to visit to navigate the book.
Author's note (1.1 edition)
When I chose Melville’s words for my epigraph, I was probably just trying to (retroactively) cover my ass — not that anybody would expect a “complete” anything from a first-time author. I didn’t even set out to write a book! What I wanted to do was to get back in design, which is something I’ve been doing on-and-off for over 15 years. So, before I plunged into making a portfolio and sending it out to agencies, I tried to take stock of what I knew about this design business. Was it all just an act of procrastination? Maybe. But, while I was pleased to find out that I did in fact know something about design, this book fails to deliver on the promise of its subtitle: there’s just too much text, not nearly enough examples and—most damning of all—there’s no practice. The idea of covering step-by-step example in Adobe software was just outside the scope of this book. But that's all changed now! I am now a happy Figma user, and if you want, you come become one too. Follow me on Twitter, and I'll show you how:
@antimofm
Brief
If you’re curious what graphic design looked like before computers, check out the 2016 documentary Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production by Briar Levit.
We don’t think about this often, but graphic design was born long before computers. As late as the 1980s, even a simple flyer involved the concerted work of cold typesetters, markup specialists, repro operators and photostat operators. These seemingly obscure professions were highly specialised, and the equipment was expensive. Compared with today’s reality this may not look like a pretty picture, but it was this division of labour that created some of the best design and advertising in history. Today, most design is created by practitioners: people who are designers by necessity, rather than by trade. The vast majority of small business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers and artists who don’t have a design budget can either make do on their own, or they can outsource. The main issue with outsourcing is not the quality; it’s the inherent risk of choosing someone whose work you can't evaluate, the inefficiency of communicating with them and the risk of becoming dependent on a middleman who doesn’t care about your product. Ultimately, the market economy of outsourcing websites inevitably drives prices down, and quality follows suit.
The best eulogy of a generalist skillset is the 2019 book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, by David Epstein.
Doing your own design (as I argue you should in this book) goes against the gospel of specialisation that has been preached since Adam Smith, but the tide is changing: generalists are not dismissed as jacks-ofall-trades anymore. T-shaped skills are becoming valuable, and as you’ll learn, a broad base of reference is one of the most important assets you can have as a designer. Besides, if you’re bootstrapping or freelancing, you’ll know that your only resources are your time and skills, and expanding your skill-set is something that will pay off sooner or later. So, what are the options if you want to learn design?
7
The myriad tutorials available online cover pretty much anything you could ever want to learn—but they don’t tell you where to start. Books, on the other hand, are often too long and tend to focus only on the technical aspects of design. The legacy of specialisation is partly to blame for this. Design software is amazingly complex; Photoshop has been accumulating features for decades (it was released exactly 30 years ago, in 1990) and, for the most part, new versions make the assumption that you’ve been using the previous ones. The problem of focusing on the technicalities is that you can miss the forest for the trees. Graphic design is like sales: it’s not easy, but it can be simple. In fact, as simple as making a list and moving the items around on a piece of paper. If you don’t believe me, click here to jump straight to the practice chapter, and I’ll show you what I mean. I wrote this book because I couldn’t imagine not being able to design; it would be like being blind— having to rely on middlemen to communicate my ideas. When I was 13 and began thinking about what to do with my life, for some reason I saw it as a binary choice: it was either programming or design. I went with the latter, and it served me well. I was able to raise hundreds of thousands for several entrepreneurial ventures, in no small part thanks to my design skills. Design has a chimeric nature: it exists at the crossroads of commerce and art, and (to the uninitiated) is indistinguishable from either. Some of its rules are borrowed from art; others are unwritten. But as you’ll learn, there are no secrets. As painter Chuck Close said, inspiration is for amateurs: the rest of us just show up and get to work. Behind great work there’s a lot of practice. Underpinning all practice is a theoretical framework where you can put new tools as they come in, which is where the book begins.
8
theory
Ideas
Design Is Not Important You Should Do Your Own Design Graphic Design Is Not Art
Keys
Action Mass-production Clients Money Taste Debt Wickedness
Principles
Peak Shift Isolation Perceptual Grouping & Binding Contrast Perceptual Problem Solving Abhorrence of Coincidence Metaphor Symmetry Repetition, Rhythm & Orderliness Balance
9
back to main index
Ideas
If you asked Michelangelo how he painted the vault of the Sistine Chapel, he’d say he did it with a brush and a scaffold. That’s not very insightful, but it’s true. If you focus on the tools of design before you understand how it works, you will only skim the surface of what you can learn from it. My personal approach to design is based on three fundamental ideas: 1
2
3
Design is not (so) important. If you outsource your design to the lowest bidder, does that mean design is not important—or is it so important that you want to defer to a professional? Can you afford to waste time and money on design... or can you afford not to? You should do your own design. As a ceo, you don't need to do your own design any more than you need to answer your company's customer service calls; but you do need to know your customers. Equally, you should know what your design is made of. Graphic design is not art. Design is visual, but it's not artistic. It's persuasion, reputation and identification. Sometimes it's communicative, others transactional. You don’t need to agree with me. Big ideas are there to expand your mind, giving you the necessary space to receive new knowledge. They are the vault.
On any page in the book, you can tap the back button go back to the previous index page:
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back to theory
ideas
1
DESIGN IS NOT IMPORTANT Karl Lagerfeld was an iconic fashion designer. His personal style was as iconic as his collections, but he was an outlier. Most couturiers dress simply and humbly: on most days, you’ll find Giorgio Armani wearing black jeans and a t-shirt. They do this because they know, more than anybody else, that they’re just clothes. Does the cowl make the monk? Who cares? Monks have to wear something, and that’s the point. Graphic design, like clothes, is not important—but it is necessary. Before thinking about the design of a product, focus on product-market fit: is the product really necessary? Is it addressed to the right audience? Does it have the necessary features? Getting these answers right will tell you most of the things you need in your design brief—and get the product right at the same time. There are no designs solutions to a product problem. Recent design thinking doesn’t separate the design from the product itself. This is well-intentioned, but there is still a trap, which leads me to second takeaway: don’t fall down a rabbit hole of perfectionism. Getting the basics right can be as simple as choosing the right colours and showing the right amount of information. That’s not hard, and everybody has the time (and talent) to do that. After that, you can turn your attention to the finer details if you have the time, but at least it won’t look wrong. In the immortal words of Gary Vaynerchuk, don’t focus on dumb shit. I’ll leave you with this: Iron Maiden are my favourite band. When their next album comes out, I’m going to buy it. If they change their logo and the new cover sucks, I’m still going to buy it.
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ideas
2
YOU SHOULD DO YOUR OWN DESIGN In 1776, most things were made by hand in craftsmen’s workshops. Making something from scratch took a lot of time and effort, even a humble paper pin: Adam Smith reckoned that a workman could (...) perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. On the other hand, a pin factory could easily make 48 thousand pins in a single day. This sort of division of labour made modern society possible. Unfortunately, modern society doesn’t just make enough; it makes too much. We make enough food to feed 10 billion people, and a third of that food gets thrown away. Entrepreneurs, freelancers and artists (who are the intended audience of this book) will have to find the solution to some hard problems, the kind that are only solved by asking the tough questions. The single hardest question you can ask about a product is whether it is necessary. In other words, what do you need all those pins for? Doing your own design will make you focus on the important things; it may actually increase your overall productivity. Does that mean that you should do all your design, never hiring or outsourcing? Of course not. But outsourcing your design without a basic knowledge of what you’re looking for is like letting someone else choose your own clothes. Once you know when design matters (and when it doesn’t), learning a bit about it can go a long way. You’ll be able to tell what you can do yourself, what can be outsourced cheaply and what needs to be done really well. It will allow you to choose your battles, win the right ones and look good while you do it.
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ideas
3
GRAPHIC DESIGN IS NOT ART This is the keystone of design; until you get this, your creative process will be more difficult than it needs to be. In art, creativity is driven by self-expression: artists must be proficient at their medium of choice, but they also need to have something to say—about themselves, the viewer or society. Graphic designers requires a degree of skill too, but their opinion is not important: there is no self-expression in graphic design. The misconception, as simplistic as it sounds, comes from the fact that the end product of graphic design is a two-dimensional picture. Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg said that ‘flatness … is the only condition painting shares with no other art. But a movie poster is not a painting just because they’re both flat. Art is not superior to design—and vice versa. They’re separate disciplines that (on the surface) share media and output. By way of analogy, food scientists and chefs both work with ingredients and recipes, but being good at one does not make you good at the other. This does not mean that graphic design cannot be artistic, but it does mean that the most artistic version of a design is not necessarily the most effective. The reasons for this are the focus of the next chapter.
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Keys
Graphic design was born of the Industrial Revolution. The term itself only appeared at the end of the 19th century, because there just wasn’t much to sell before that: back then, food made up half the expense of the average household (as opposed to just about 10% today), but it was sold as a commodities in local markets—think tomatoes in jute sacks—rather than products. That changed quickly, however: while Europeans were busy killing each other on the continent, the US were busy manufacturing the modern economy and it was the job of graphic designers to sell it. The number of products, services and niche markets that exist today makes graphic design a complex machine, and using it effectively requires a set of seven keys: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Action Mass-production Clients Money Taste Debt Wickedness Some unlock better work, others a better you.
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keys
1
ACTION In the words of Milton Glaser, design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one. That preferred condition is the main driver of your design process: your viewer must take action to achieve it. Making sure that they do is the designer’s job.
A painting doesn’t want anything from you; a movie poster wants you to go see the movie. This is what separates design from art. Action usually takes place outside your design: you can’t buy movie tickets on the poster. ux design appears different because it’s interactive, but it’s not: tapping a 'Get Tickets' button on an app will just take you to a different screen. Action is not necessarily transactional, nor does it have to be immediate: movies are promoted months before you can actually buy the tickets. Pedestrian crossings want you to cross the road on the zebra pattern, and nowhere else. A well-designed text wants to be read in its entirety, rather than skimmed. A book cover wants to be noticed and opened. A logo wants to be remembered. If you don’t know what your call to action is, identify that first—then get back to design.
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keys
2
MASS-PRODUCTION The IT revolution didn’t change the industrial nature of modern society, it just moved its main focus from factories to offices. In 1841, over 50% of the UK worked in manufacturing and agriculture. In 2011, over 80% were employed in the service sectors. All graphic design is industrial design: it’s made once and reproduced industrially. This has implication on how it’s produced, as well as how it is consumed. For example, if your design is meant to be printed, it needs to work with a cmyk colour scheme.
40"
27"
Mass-production requires standardisation. Movie posters always measure 27×40 inches (2:3 ratio), a format called one sheet. Even within the canvas, the various elements (title, main cast, credits...) are placed according to tradition. That's why pretty much all movie posters, from Jaws to Avengers, use Univers 39 font for credits (more on this on page 61). Standardisation, in turn, reinforces familiarity: if you use a layout that the viewer is familiar with, they’ll recognise it immediately (ie. subconsciously) and they’ll focus on the content. If the layout is original, they’ll notice that consciously, and read the whole thing with more attention. Consistency is one of the forms of beauty, contrast is another. Both can work, but be aware of the difference.
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keys
3
CLIENTS Whether you talk directly to your client or there is a manager in the middle, the situation hasn't changed: design is done for a client. jaws may have been screened for the audience, but the poster was approved by universal pictures. You must take yourself out of the equation; your work is not a tool for you self-expression. You’ll be hard-pressed to find clients who wants your style to come through your design work, and you certainly won’t be able to sign in the bottom right. It’s not meant to please you, and it’s not meant to please the customers either. Consider horror movies: fear is an inherently negative emotion, and we turn away from what scares us. But that doesn’t stop horror movies from making a killing (pun intended) at the box office. This is the hardest part of being your own designer. You will be prone to perfectionism and go off on artistic tangents. Be ruthless about it. Use a process and follow Stephen King’s advice: kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings. A note for professional designers: your work isn’t your clients’ pet, either. Although you can never eliminate your client’s input (nor should you want to—if they know what they’re talking about, that input will be valuable), part of your job is to explain this stuff to them, so you have a chance to make the most effective design for the job, and increase their business in the process. The more your client trusts you, the more creative freedom you’ll have. That’s the goal.
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keys
MONEY Design always comes with a price tag.
$1.50 ADMIT ONE
4
ONLY GOOD ON DATE SOLD
That cost can be expressed in money or in the time it takes to consume your product: whatever the case, it should inform your design choices in more than a few ways. An ad for a Volkswagen Polo aims at different audiences than one for an Audi r8, and they should communicate different things. This must be reflected in the choice of colour palettes, typefaces, amount of space and amount of information.
As a general rule, the smaller the price, the wider is the audience you'll need to appeal to. Children’s products can use bright and playful colours; premium ones will use simpler combinations of white, black, gold and silver. Low-end products should contain all the information you can possibly display, because the buyer will be looking to compare it with similar products; luxury products, on the other hand, should contain little to no information, because you must assume the buyer has already done their research. Just like design can’t fix product bugs, it can’t make up for a lack of marketing: cramming a flyer full of information and alluring content isn’t going to bring more people to your event. These are just a few examples at each end of the spectrum: there are countless exceptions to every rule, and even more examples in between. But the rule is clear: make your design look like it's worth the money.
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keys
5
TASTE If you want to create good design, you must first acquire a taste for what good design looks like.
The ter r if ying m ot ion pict u r e f r om t he t er r if ying No. 1 best seller.
PG
Many branches of arts have a Canon, which is really a fancy word to describe what art should look like if you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, there is no such thing in design. Most examples you can find on the Internet are terrible, because many designers unknowingly carry bad-design debt. But mainly, graphic design is just too young: the fine arts have hundreds of years of history, compared to maybe one century of graphic design. On top of that, it’s evolving every day, which makes it all the more important for you to stay on the curve. Even if there was a canon of graphic design, it wouldn’t really help you. What you need to know is the canon of your industry. I don’t know what a medical supply company is supposed to look like, and I don’t need to. The smaller the niche, the more this knowledge will be need-to-know, meant to reinforce the belonging to a specific professional group.
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6
DEBT Before you can grow confident as a designer, you need to get rid of your bad design debt. Manga offer a great analogy. Pick up a few popular names and you’ll quickly notice that they’re not exactly paragons of anatomy, especially compared to western comics. The reason for that makes for an interesting digression: even though the Japanese market for manga is four times larger than the market for comic books in the US and Canada, until 2006 there was no school for learning manga anywhere in Japan. So where did mangakas learn to draw all these years? In the workshops of other famous mangakas. Japanese culture is conservative. Crafts are taught in workshops, where students apprentice in close contacts with their masters—much like Renaissance artists’ workshops. The problem of this model is that a lot of students inherit the good along with the bad, and not all great artists are equally great teachers. Some anatomical “peculiarities” that may have been a conscious choice (but probably weren’t) are just accepted as the norm, and a few iterations down the road nobody knows what a deltoid is.
Skeuomorphism describes graphic user interfaces that look like real-world counterparts: when the iPhone was released, its touch controls and high resolution made some designers think it would be cool for apps to look real. Well, it wasn’t.
Most self-taught graphic designers, including me, have started out with online tutorials. That’s a great way to get to grips with the software, but if you don’t supplement that with a taste library and a knowledge of basic principles, your only option will be copying the latest design trends. The rise and fall of skeuomorphism is a textbook example of this. In graphic design, instead of anatomical proportions, we use grids. Learn what they are and use them.
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keys
7
For more on the theory of learning environments, check out the 2015 paper by Robin M. Hogarth, The Two Settings of Kind and Wicked Learning Environments
WICKEDNESS There are two kinds of learning environments: kind and wicked. In kind environments, patterns repeat over time and feedback is accurate and rapid. Think about chess and golf: they have clear rules and controlled conditions; the more you practice them, the better you get. The chessboard is always the same. Practice is everything. In wicked domains, the rules are often unclear or incomplete, there may not be repetitive patterns (or they may not be obvious) and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Graphic design is the definition of a wicked learning environment. There are no ostensible rules, no real patterns (you’re supposed to create original work), and good luck getting feedback. If you make the same stuff over and over again, you will end up a worse designer than you were at the outset. The secret to beating the game and improving your design skills is expanding your perspective. The first way to do that is to look at old stuff. As Kirby Ferguson said, nothing is original: everything is a remix. Even in fashion, where old is automatically obsolete, trends follow a 20-year cycle (it used to be longer, but that changed with prêt-à-porter collections). How far back into the past you need to look depends on your case, but as a rule, if something’s considered vintage, it should be old enough. Incidentally, in the antiques and collectible industries, something that’s 20 years old is vintage, so there must be something there. It’s not just a matter of hiding your sources: creativity itself works by unconscious associations. If you’re looking for inspiration too close to home, you’ll know that you know that stuff, and if you do, so do your viewers. Looking at old stuff gives you insights into unfamiliar times and can spark your creativity.
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Death and obsolescence are not inherently bad thing; the old enriches the soil for the new. When I was looking for inspiration for this book, I knew it was important for this version to be simple and actionable, so initial brainstorming pointed me towards terms like “simplicity” and “instructions”. From that point, I stumbled upon vintage instruction manuals, which pretty much shaped the whole book, from the bullet-point tables of contents to the monochrome vector illustrations. The second way to improve is to look outside your subject—and your own experience. Remember, every design is new. There are no rules. If you’re designing a movie poster, you don’t need to restrict your search to old movie posters. Look at opera night posters from 1920s, bananas stems under a microscope, Soviet propaganda art, pictures of Jupiter. The farther from your work, the better. Of course, you have to find some way to link the elements relationally; in other words, you’ll have to make analogies. Some of the greatest advances in science and modern thought were made using analogies, for the very reason that there were no closer examples that could be studied. Einstein developed the theory of special relativity through to a series of thought experiments, one of which was riding a lightbeam: to a surfer riding the wave of light, it would not seem to be moving. When Kepler set out to describe the laws of planetary motion, he was so far outside the bounds of previous human thought that he had to use analogies. In 1609, the year he published astronomia nova, people still believed that the Sun orbited the Earth. Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter only in 1610, and the man who was going to discover gravity (Isaac Newton) was yet to be born. Without gravity, without momentum, his only option was thinking outside the box. One of his discoveries (the influence of the moon on the tides) was too far out there even for Galileo, who mocked it as a ridiculous idea.
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keys
The same principles apply to creating new design, or to finding the solution to communicative puzzles. The more abstract your subject (or complex your design), the farther you’ll have to go. This strategy is the key to creativity of all kinds, not just in graphic design. It works the other way around, too: the more limited your inspiration, the worse your results. Studies have shown that a predominantly “internal” dataset will yield “extreme” (or in the case of design, ugly) results. To learn exactly how to find inspiration, how to find raw and qualified input and let your creativity flow, visit the chapter on Inspiration.
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