Type Animal Critique

Grading Quiz 2

Legibility Book Design project

This project is to reinforce your understanding of legibility of type - a very important aspect of Graphic Design.

When it comes to creating a visual hierarchy for book design - use color, contrast, spacing, and other basic principles of design to organize and prioritize your content.

Link to Project Handout

Objective

Students will discuss and collaborate on conceptual ideas for layout
Students will expand their skills to establish order and visual flow in design
Students will be able to express individual approaches to a book design

Schedule

Activities
*Team collaborations*
Layout ideas will be done in teams; tasks will be developed and assigned to each team member.




*Assignments:*
Legibility Book Canvas submission
*Approaches*
*Approaches*
1) Size. The larger something is, the more important it is. It is the first thing the eye will see and thus, by implication, the most important thing to look at. 2) Position. As we read things from top to bottom and left to right, placement of items first at the top and then on the left give them more importance. This is the reason logos on websites are placed in the top left corner. We naturally look first at the top and move our eyes down. And if there are multiple items in one row, we will naturally start on the left and more our way to the right. 3) Negative space. Negative space (or whitespace) can be used to increase or decrease the importance of items. Generally, the more negative space you give an item, the more important that item is. Negative space allows your eye to better isolate and see an element. This is the reason we have space above and below a heading. It is also a key to Apple’s design philosophy—a lot of white space creates importance to the item within that space. Conversely, however, white space can give an item a sense of smaller scale and in this fashion can be used to reduce the importance of the elements. 4) Color. There are three primary components to color and each of these can be used to create a hierarchy—saturation, hue, and lightness/darkness. Hue: The choice of color in a design should be appropriate to the overall concept and context. Certain colors stand out more than others and can have psychological implications. Saturation: In any design that is primarily black and white, the item with color is being given higher importance. This can be used in its most primitive fashion where everything is in greyscale except the item you are drawing attention to. Lightness/Darkness: In a mostly dark design, bright elements will come forward and appear more important. Conversely, in a primarily light design, a dark element will draw attention. This leads us to contrast. 5) Contrast. Many of the above depend on contrast to work—saturation of color, size, and so forth. But contrast can be used in other ways as well. A contrast in a pattern, mood lines, of color—all of these can help you in creating hierarchy in your design. In lowering the importance of an element within your design hierarchy, reducing contrast is an extremely effective tool. 6) Repetition: Repetition provides meaning to visual elements and allows one to more easily and quickly assimilate information. When you see items in a list, you can easily predict the context of the proceeding items in the same list. When you see and understand one icon’s information, the rest can be understood far more quickly. 7) Alignment: Alignment creates order and visual coherence to a design. It allows for your audience to place relative importance to elements on a page, establish beginning and endpoints, and associate items together or apart depending on their alignment or misalignment.