Thank goodness it’s over
This very simple but rather effective design will be today’s featured Design of the week. It shows , among other things, how one can use Symbols to quickly ‘categorize’ a composition. He who can use symbols with profit will… well profit handsomely. It’s a great way to make a statement, grab attention and influence people.
If at the end of a corridor, I put a sign with just a single arrow and no message whatsoever, guess what everyone who gets to this sign will do? Follow the arrow? Exactly! And without hesitating, as if they knew what they will encounter in that direction. In this design, I did the same thing with a graduation cap: if you take the cap off, “you’re NOT graduating! HA”! I meant to say: “if you take the cap off, it’s not a graduation card anymore”.
Here, I pick a nice pattern, throw in my favorite colors and this is my background. I take a graduation cap, turn it into a semi-transparent object, seemingly floating around, and immediately I have a graduation card. The third element, the greeting, I did rather loosely: I frame my lettering to suggest a face, and put it on a stick. One, Two, Three, Done!
Actually, it was not this simple. First I had to play around a lot, to get to a decent pattern-color combination. Second, when rendering an object, “transparent” does not cry for attention. One would try many things that keep clashing with the background before realizing that most of the times, he can make a transparent object blend into the surrounding areas.
The third element shows the use of lettering to fill out a shape. This design technique can produce some rather nice results. At the same time, you can be left with some out of this world monsters; I know I had been. When you play around with patterns and colors, the good combination will come to you rather quickly at times. That’s what I call “a happy accident”. Other times it won’t come so easily: you will be sitting around painting the ceiling in your mind, sucking on that nasty pencil.
Bosses hate this idling time: they don’t want to pay someone to sit around and doodle on paper or on their computer. Hey, this is what graphic design is about!
So, designing a greeting card is a pretty simple process, huh? Pick a background, “anchor” your sending situation with a symbol, throw in few words for the message, and voilá! True, but you forgot doodling time! That’s how the Design gods get you.
I am not a minimalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I believe in designing with speed. Can you think of a few ways to simplify this design even further without compromising the overall effect and message?
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Blog post by Tatán
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