5 Practical Graphic Design Basics to Quickly Improve Your Designs Texture

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Graphic Design Basics

Knowing the graphic design basics can help you make excellent graphic design texture in a few clicks. This article will give you some graphic design tutorials and advice to allow you to create outstanding graphic design types. Understanding graphic design basics and improve texture in your design, make the work from mediocrity to excellence via 5 methods!

Have you ever thought about this problem: I have read a lot of design books, and the article Designing a Big Cow is not falling. The project that has been used for several years is not difficult, at least in terms of quantity. Saying “design experience” is very rich. But why go around dribbble, Behance, FWA, you can always clearly feel that the style is similar, other people’s works look very textured, the details are in place, their own is plain, not satisfied. Where is the problem?

Not only the designers who just got started will have such confusion, even the senior designers who have experienced the battle will face similar bottlenecks, but the depth is different.

So, how to settle, how to give the final design of the design, let the final design stand out? The following five graphic design basics (levels, colors, shadows, fonts, and atmosphere) can help you solve this problem.

Level

The hierarchy is divided into planes and depths. Any designer should be fully aware that a rhythmic level change can produce subtle chemical reactions in the user’s heart.

Let’s look at an example.

This is a simple base map + text (the background is Qatar Airways), nothing special. However, there are many problems. If you fix it, it’s really not worth publishing. First and foremost is how flat all the layers and content look when put together, losing any sense of a visual center of gravity; secondly, the picture has no sense of depth, which means it looks uninspired.

graphic design basics

Before (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

Take a look at the basic concepts. We can start here:

The depth of the first and second levels and the strength of the body are separated;

The square frame cuts the wing on the left side but appears in front of it on the right to form a sense of depth;

Let’s see the effect:

graphic design basics

After (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

See the difference? A slight modification that doesn’t veer too far from the basic concepts brings a really fresh take on an otherwise standard idea.

The graphic design principle  is simple:

By highlighting or weakening the elements in the picture later, artificially creating a visual difference greatly enhances how three-dimensional the picture looks.

graphic design basics

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

“The order in which the elements of the picture appear to the human eye”

Applying these techniques in design to create a rhythmic layering of your own design may result in very different results.

Color

Color is the most important graphic design basic which must be adjusted to have an effect, otherwise, even though it may be a good design draft, but because the color is not used enough in an active way, it is criminally underused.

Let’s look at this picture:

graphic design basics

Click Photo to Edit the Right Template

No doubt, the latter is definitely more comfortable, but if you want to look into it further, let’s take a look at the color of the picture:

yard sale mosaic (1)

Click Photo to Edit the Right Template

There are more than 10 colors on the left side, and there are only 3 colors on the right side.

graphic design elements

Always remember that in the vast majority of uncertainties, you must strictly control the amount of color in your picture.

Let’s look at another example:

graphic design principles

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

Similarly, colors are extracted and correspond to the color wheel:

graphic design basics

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

Found the problem?

What kind of product, and what kind of color combination do we use?

graphic design basics

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

When it comes to color selection, you have now seen 4 different methods that can increase your color efficiency:

Approximate color

Complementary color

Same color

Natural hues (in the picture)

In terms of approximate colors, there are ready-made tools such as Adobe Color, and Apple Scheme designers also use Color Schemer Studio 2 to help. You can also use the online graphic design tool to take a positive or negative 30° color on the color wheel, which is usually a very good approximation. Color combination.

graphic design colors

Adobe color (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

30 degrees

Color Schemer Studio (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

We put the color of the Color Schemer in the above picture to match the color on site. Do you think it works?

graphic design color element

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

“Monterian constitutes the style of work, recombined according to approximate color”

In addition to the complementary color, the corresponding two colors on the color wheel are the color combinations with the strongest visual impact.

graphic design basics

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

But you need to finalize a primary color and several secondary colors.

graphic design basics

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

Then determine the proportion of the color block:

graphic design principle

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

For the same color system, which is relatively simple, by deepening or lightening the basic color, you can define a set of available colors:

white and black

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

After selecting a color, superimpose 20% white and 20% black respectively, and get the desired color combination.

Finally, take a look at natural colors. Use this photo of Jennifer Lawrence, and put it into Fotor online photo editing software to the suction pen to identify the main colors in the image:

graphic design tool

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

Based on these colors and the ratio of the primary and secondary colors, we can complete a usable layout design in just a few minutes:

graphic design poster

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

This slightly increases the brightness and saturation of the picture.

If the work is found to be unsatisfactory in design, the problem may be the colors.

The above 4 skills can be used flexibly in any scenario, so let’s make sure we know what to do.

Shadow

From the moment the bright glare of the GUI interface design lit up our lives, the use of shadows dimmed those lights.

The application interface at the end of the 20th century was still fundamentally the same:

windows

Windows 2000 Pro Preview (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

As you can see, the interface is designed with both highlights and shadows. At that time, GUI design was an emerging industry. Everyone had nothing to reference. Traditional graphics and printing design were difficult to learn from, and it was subject to the limitations of the graphics software.

Later, design tools were iterated and more and more, especially after the iPhone OS, the design of Skeuomorph swept the design industry, reaching its peak in iOS 6. Almost all designers are desperately trying to draw icons, spending a lot of time on projections, reflections, textures, and highlights in interfaces. These designs can attract attention, and whoever wins:

graphic design shadow principle

(Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

After the flat design was implemented in iOS 7, the design industry at that time exploded. The design skills that labored for have been abandoned. They still considered the shadows. You have to say what is the most popular design style in 2014, no doubt Gradien and Long Shadow:

graphic design basic

Typical Long Projection Design (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

If you still have an impression, you must remember that at the time the App Store only applied to the recommended list, and most of them are this style.

Then the designers seemed to tire of long projections and began to turn to paper-based design, plus a wide range of thin shadows to enhance the texture. The style is still flat, but everyone has added a lot of new graphic design basics and elements due to exploring the process and changed the way to make a different feeling.

graphic design basic-banner image

Source: www.bfa.com.tw

In order to better understand the evolution of design styles over these two decades, Big Bear drew the following picture to see the leopard:

shadow in design

The Evolution of the Use of Shadows in Design (Source: www.bfa.com.tw)

What Big Bear wants to say is that you should not resist graphic design trends, and the rise of new design styles and graphic design types must have its time in the spotlight. (For example, the flat design frees the designer from endless stacks of pixels, from a more practical perspective to design, lets the energy return to the most basic interactions and user experience.) However, always keep thinking, a style is a foreign object, and the right can be magical.

Atmosphere

Excellent design work always works with how the atmosphere is rendered, just like how going to a restaurant to eat, the same dish placed on the table can be expected to be completely different if you are at an Applebee’s or a Michelin-star restaurant. We spent 95% of the time re-evaluating the rationality of the design and the consistency of its interaction. Why not spend 5% of the time, and finally design the others to look good, and come up with something better looking?

The more you care, the better the results.

Font

With the right font, a design can pop that means font is an important graphic design basic.

You don’t want to use the Song body in a cartoonish design, and for the same reason, and you won’t use a doll body on the cover of a serious literary work.

Using the wrong typeface is like climbing in high heels and running with slippers. It’s always hard work and doesn’t look good.

You can find many fonts on tools like Fotor Design Maker.

graphic design text basic

The most common English fonts I use to add text to photos are simply these:

font

Basic is the system that comes with fonts. Please use search engines.

In addition, it must be mentioned that the current logo of the company where Big Bear works is also a variant design based on the font of Lucida Grande (this font is quite the classic):

haobtc

Source: www.bfa.com.tw

So, this means for you…

Whenever a design is nearing its end, remember to re-combine from these five: hierarchy, color, shadow, atmosphere, and font even more graphic design basics. You will realize that if everything is a little better than before, overall the design will vary greatly.

Pay attention to the details you accumulate, and look with your heart. The design will be better for it.

The points mentioned in this article may seem like common sense, but sometimes it takes someone to say it out loud for anyone to truly realize the concepts. To really improve your design ability, lots of effort and practice needs to be put into these concepts across different scenarios. Those masters in the design industry only got there after years and years of hard work and learning from their mistakes. Only by continuing to learn, maybe one day, you can make a design moves others.

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