Design This

What is a design? What’s in a design? Who is a designer? To begin our exploration of these questions, we will take a look into the history of the word itself. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary the word “design” comes into common use in the mid 1500’s from the Latin infinitive designare which means “mark out, devise” from de – “out” + the Latin infinitive signare “to mark” from the nominative signum “a mark, sign” Anything from a piece of paper with a stray mark composed by a child in kindergarten to a high end advertisement in a magazine qualifies as a design.

The majority of the time an artist is going to start with a blank canvas. Here canvas refers to whatever platform the artist is using. A blank canvas has 100% negative space. Negative space refers to unused space. As soon as the first mark is made, that specific action reduces or “marks out” the amount of negative space on the canvas therefore anyone who has made a mark on a piece of paper is a designer.

Now that we see that almost everybody qualifies as a designer we have to look at what makes a specific design more effective than the others. Now I’m going to speak specifically about graphic design.

Graphic design is everywhere you look. In this day and age we are overloaded with designs to the point where many of us our numb to them. Nevertheless designs are still apart of the culture and there are rules (seen and unseen) that are present that affect the way we receive the message that the designer is communicating.

Effective designs contain basic elements of line, shape, composition, scale, color, texture, and value. We can even add the use of gradients, repetition and balance. Hierarchy is the key element that graphic designers have to use properly that other non-graphic artist don’t use as much. Hierarchy, in a lot of cases, relates to text and how a designer emphasizes which information is more important. Simple techniques are putting the more important information at the top and less important information at the bottom. Making more important information larger in scale and less important information smaller in scale. The most common way is to bold or italicized more important information. These are just a few hierarchy rules that can help to clarify information.