Well, clearly a poster or CD cover that includes just an image and a headline doesn’t need a grid (although even the addition of a prescribed margin could be called a grid), but complex layout involving multiple elements including long copy frequently falls apart with it. And there were many design crimes committed in the 80s
There are, of course, examples of design that eschew the grid. But for a beginner, this really isn’t the place to start, as shown by the OP’s work. As my tutors would say to us when we felt our creativity hindered, 'learn the rules then you will learn how to break them successfully’.
Oh, I agree. I have the same issues when teaching photography to a beginner. I weasel out of it by teaching “rules” as “guidelines.” Like the whole “rule of thirds” thing. It works, but it’s a “rule” that gets broken left and right. And there are just some people who have an intuitive sense of frame that seems to break all the conventions, yet works. But, yes, it’d be impossible to teach if you had to mention every exception to every “rule.”
Hi, another graphic designer here: the remarks about learning to use the software features was, perhaps, about discovering specifically how the tools available to you can help you to align, organize and develop your designs, as opposed to, say, how to use a drop shadow or create a gradient.
As to grids: Some clients live and die by grids, especially if you’re an on-staff designer or regular contractor for a major corporation with all sorts of brand guidelines to follow. On the other hand, some of your layouts, especially ones with few elements, might be OK for you to design with barely any grid in mind, but your viewers will likely “create” a grid mentally while looking at the work, so you still need to be aware of them. Sometimes it’s good to step back and take a fresh look at your work; maybe get someone else to look at it, or even print it out and look at it upside down; that’s a good way to force yourself to look at a design more abstractly; make note of where your eye travels, where it rests, what sort of “flow” is created. Good luck!
Gotcha. Will keep both in mind in the future. The busy layouts are something I’m definitely trying to change.
The grids… bah… I still don’t get it, but if nothing else, I’ll turn on grids in Photoshop and try to line things up by them and see how they turn out.
I am still totally confused about the grids. Beyond snapping to them so things look more or less parallel, what’s the basic idea? I’m a photographer and I understand the Rule of Thirds, but what additional grid-based guidelines ought I to know for graphic design?
For flyers, yes. What is it I’m supposed to do in InDesign that I wouldn’t be doing in Photoshop? (I take it it’s not as simple as “snap to grid”?)
Indeed Did you use to live here?
Indeed! The “make the world your chalkboard” flyer won 2nd place in a class competition. The first place winner was a really beautiful, minimal design with large text against a plain colored background. On the whiteboard with some 30 flyers, it was the only one that truly stood out – and it was gorgeous. Now I know.
Wow… maybe my sense of aesthetics is just horribly skewed, but like the grid book posted earlier, well, I just find those layouts terribly ugly (especially the Neue spread, which is really difficult to follow along). But if this is considered the standard way of doing things, I guess it’s just me.
Fine, ok, I owe it to myself and my audience to at least understand the system before rejecting it. I’ll see if I can find something to read up on – just maybe not a whole book
Still not sure what I’m supposed to be doing in InDesign for something as simple as a flyer that Photoshop wouldn’t be able to handle? If it’s a whole magazine (or even a brochure), I understand, but a flyer?
Photoshop handles vector text just fine, btw, and even vector paths, shapes, and masks. It has for quite a few versions. It may or may not rasterize for sending to the printer, but at the DPIs we print at, it doesn’t really matter.
Would you be able to explain the basics of the grid system? I mean, beyond “there is an invisible grid, use it”?
So I looked at several dozen grid-based designs, and one thing that seems to universally bother me about them: they seem to sacrifice a lot of visual hierarchy. When everything’s roughly the same shape (and especially the same size), it’s really hard to tell what’s more important and what direction your eye is supposed to go.
I am an amateur, to be sure, but to me, it seems like odd, eye-catching shapes more easily say “look at me first!” than merely more blocks – even bigger blocks. Is this wrong?
Or am I completely misunderstanding grid-based vs, well, block-based layouts?
Sorry, missed this. I’m a photographer, so I can’t answer this question definitively. My use of grids comes from my newspaper design experience where there is an obvious underlying grid to the design, with columns, gutters, etc. Visual hierarchy is not a problem–elements can span multiple columns, you can create emphasis with color, typefaces, etc.
I personally am not familiar with the theory behind formal grid systems like the ones SanVito has linked to. He would be better suited to answer the question.
I’m going to reply to this from the perspective of websites, because that’s what I’m most familiar with.
I once had a designer send a website layout in Illustrator. They used no grid. Each individual page layout they sent us was not lined up - the padding between elements varied by a couple of pixels, the top navigation varied slightly in width and height between each page. I had to guess what they meant for elements. For example, 960px is a common width for a layout in web design these days. Some pages would be 961px wide, 957, 962…I just went with 960 because it’s standard. Sometimes the content would have a gutter of 17px or 19px or 20px, I would go with 20.
Being designed to a grid would have made my job a lot easier. If you only intend on making logos or flyers, fine. But there aren’t a hell of a lot of graphic design jobs out there where you only work on one type of design.
Do you use CMYK in Photoshop? Printers don’t do colour by RGB!
Also, people in this thread are giving you advice on graphic design, which is what you asked for. You’re focusing on only doing certain things in design. You need to think the other way - InDesign is one of the default tools for print design. You can use InDesign for flyers, brochures, magazines, mailouts and everything in between. You just need to switch your thinking between each kind of project. Would you design a billboard in Photoshop? Hell, I don’t even know the DPI for that.
I work at an ad agency. One of the big kerfluffles right now is all the graphic designers having no idea how to design for web and management wants them to learn. I can’t imagine what would happen if they couldn’t handle all aspects of print design. We deal with all sorts of media, from print (brochures, one sheets, reports, billboards, cardboard cutouts, banners, direct mailouts, newspaper ads) to TV/film (commercials, trailers) to animation and illustration for both. Our head illustrator has had to hop in and do corporate web design!
Photoshop will limit what kind of projects you can take on - which, if it’s just an added bonus skill for you, might not matter. But if you ‘graphic design’ on your resume, people are going to expect you to know many of these things.
When I worked with newspapers, we always did our own CMYK separations. However, nowadays, all of the places where I get work printed (which is mostly photo labs and bookbinders, but a few press-printed places as well) seem to always ask for sRGB files. Now, as a photographer, I suppose this is because photographic prints are not CMYK prints, but even the places I use that make press-printed books (like AsukaBook) with a CMYK process ask for sRGB files. And certainly all the consumer-level print shops ask for RGB, too. So all these places do their own CMYK conversions and generally ask you to use their color profiles and soft-proof in Photoshop.
I hope I do not sound more combative than inquisitive. I’m not against learning the grid or InDesign (truly I am not), but I was hoping to understand why they are so important before I read through entire books on them. More precisely, I wanted to know if there’s some particular aspect I should be focusing on in my learning.
For grids, that’s still an open-ended question, but perhaps it’s just one of those things that I’ll understand once I understand (as recursive as that is). The Zen of Grids, sort of?
As for InDesign: Certainly CMYK separation cannot be its main strength, just as vector text is not. Photoshop can do CMYK too – but would it really matter much without end-to-end calibrated color management? Photoshop can also lay out arbitrary grids, guides, and rulers, and I can snap objects to them, align objects according to each other, etc.
The pros must use InDesign for some reason associated with its layout prowess that I’m not getting. If we were talking about a multi-page spread, a book, a newspaper, a magazine, anything where text management and reflow were a constant concern, I think it’d be an obvious choice because Photoshop cannot do those things.
And being familiar with the web side of things, I understand that Photoshop wouldn’t be sufficient, but mainly because a “screen” is a fluid medium/size dependent on resolution, browser, template, device, window size, etc. Plus, web sites need internal cross-page consistency that you can’t easily replicate in Photoshop.
But an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper suffers from no such ambiguity, does it? So I have InDesign. I can learn to use it. But what should I be focusing on? Turn on grids, ok, got it. But what do I do with it after that? Are you all just saying “learn the InDesign basics, and then you’ll see”? Maybe it’s just not an easy thing to explain but would be obvious to someone who’s used InDesign?
Photoshop really is a bad program to do design in. I do it because I’m too lazy to learn InDesign and because I have 3rd party extensions that do some of the basic design work I need. But it’s really a hackish way to do it.
Let’s pick a very simple example. I want to make a layout where I have four photos on the left side of the page, all square, in a 2x2 grid with, say, a 10 pixel gutter in between them. This is dead simple to do in InDesign. How do you do it in Photoshop? And, then, let’s say you change your mind. Now you want to make it a 15 pixel gutter, and 2:3 aspect ratio on your photos? InDesign makes this easy. Photoshop does not.
This is just one example. InDesign makes it really easy to align elements, divide elements, run text in columns, etc. If you want to do design, you really, really ought to learn InDesign. Photoshop is crap for serious design work.
Print pieces should have one no-doubt-about-it center of interest. It can be a headline, it can it an illustration, it can be a photo, but tell the viewer where you want his eye to go first. Usually the C-of-I will dominate the page. One big item with four little items is much better than 5 medium size items.
In a good design the eye gets directed from item to item, and then gets pulled back to the starting point (center of interest). In some of your designs my eye gets sent to a cul-de-sac. For example, in the Play With Mud designs my attention bounces endlessly between the two big headlines.
Play With Mud - Pose Like Adam
When I try to look away, the photos push me right back to those headlines. It’s actually difficult to look at the other parts of the flyer. In Seeds of Change the fist and flower petals insist on directing my eye to the girl’s green teeth and mustache.
Another thing: when in doubt line up your type. Make it flush left or centered or flush right. There are times to make exceptions, but it’s one of those things where you shouldn’t break the rules unless you completely understand the rules.
I’m pretty indifferent about grids. If you’re designing a multi-page publication, yeah you need the pages to look similar, but for a one-off ad or box or flyer I almost never use a grid.
Did you use to live here?