Composing A Symphony Of Graphics
Written by Deb Dorchak - September 29, 2011 0 Comments
These days anyone can call themselves a designer. In our instant-do-it-yourself world, all you have to do is pick up a bit of software, learn how to use it and away you go.
Easy enough, right? Maybe.
A lot of people like to create their own banners and other graphics for their web pages, or covers for their ebooks. Sometimes, the DIYer gets lucky and makes a visually appealing design. Other times…not so much.
What’s missing? A knowledge of composition.
Crafting a good graphic, whether it’s for a little 125×125 ad or a whole website, comes down to the fundamentals of composition. What is composition? It’s an arrangements of elements (images and fonts) and their relationship to one another as a whole.
Point of Interest
Every graphic has a subject. This point of interest is what attracts your viewer and delivers the message. Usually you only have about 3 seconds to grab a person’s attention and get your message across.
For our purposes today we’ll use the banner (header) of your website as an example. When people come to your site it’s going to be the very first thing they see. You could say it’s the point of interest for the whole site. Within that banner is another point of interest, which is probably going to be the name of your site.
Make sure your site’s name is in an easily readable font. If you get too fancy with flowing scripts or handwritten styles, visitors may not be able to make out the words. The biggest mistake I see is when people try to use all caps with an elaborate script. It’s not pretty. It’s a mess of chaotic swirls that mean nothing.
Take this into account with your tagline too. Taglines are usually smaller lines of text beneath your site’s name. A handwritten style can look nice, but if you use the wrong one, all the letters begin to run together and no one can read it. This leads us to the next part of composition…
Simplicity
Keep it simple. Too much clutter, too many busy background images or textures can be just as bad as the wrong font. Do you remember when the web first started? People would use all kinds of textured backgrounds on their pages. They’d also use blinking letters, animations, neon colors and just about everything except the kitchen sink. It’s easy to get carried away with new techniques and effects. They’re fun and, especially if you’re just starting out, you want to show the world everything you can do.
The best thing you can do is show some restraint. There’s no need to do everything at once. Clean and simple is the mantra.
Balance and the Rule of Three
When it comes to graphics, you don’t always want everything to be equally balanced. On a website, the way our eyes flow over it is in a kind of “Z” shaped pattern. We start in the upper left, scan across the header, then move down to the navigation, starting at the far left again, and keep moving down the page in that fashion.
You want your images to contribute to this flow and that will mean setting the elements in your header slightly off balance if you have more than just the title of the site there. When you use images, like logos or photos, make sure they keep the eye path flowing in the right direction.
The rule of three plays into this sense of balance by keeping things asymmetrical. When you have an even amount of objects on both sides of an image, it makes it static. The movement stops. It becomes heavy.
Use an odd number of objects to keep the eyes moving. Think of it like a sentence with pictures. Three will keep the sentence going, four will put the period on the end of it.
These tips are only the tip of what goes into good composition. Some people spend a lifetime learning how to do it correctly. Before you sit down and start working with your graphics program, take the time to think about composition and how it will best suit your overall message. Content may be King, but if you want people to stay on your site, that site is going to have to make visual sense to begin with.
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