This is the first installment of our Design of the Week feature. It’s a post where we will pick one of our designs to find out if it works or not, and why. A kind of troubleshooting after the fact. At the same time we will be learning a few principles of Layout, Typography, Beauty, Balance, etc.
At first glance this looks like a beautiful composition. I would say it is! It has simplicity, symmetry and it was a fast job (this last quality is number one in my book). But some people would say it is also full of design clichés. Maybe it is or it just seems so. Let’s find out.
First is the use of one regular font and one script. In Traditional Display Advertising it’s almost a law. Everybody and their signmaking grandmother are doing this. But it works! I find out that mixing script and regular always works if one manages to avoid a few pitfalls.
Script letterings are ornate, beautiful and flowery. They bring a sort of feminine energy to the composition, they soften it so to speak. This is their one major advantage. They also make it easy to balance the layout by letting us play with the tails of certain letters. We can then fill out the pockets of white space that would otherwise detract from the overall effect we are looking for. It is is rather easy for a sign artist or a calligrapher as this can be achieved with one or two strokes of the brush or pen. But, in a drawing program like CorelDraw (or Ilustrator, or Inkscape, etc) it’s a bit tricky as you must actually “draw” not just “transform”!
In the composition above, I just used the font as is. I could have closed the gap between the 0 in “40″ and the Y in “Years” but I did not because it was not absolutely necessary. If the font was bolder it would have been critical to do so. But with such an “airy” type, the white space is not too bothersome.
The second cliché is the use of that dreaded Emboss filter. Professional designers side this as one of the cheap software tricks to avoid. They despise “Artifices”. I love them! First, they speed up the design process. For me it’s just just like using pencil strokes in a sketch or a comp. Second, they are Art!
Way back in my first art class (you know the kind where they put a bunch of stuff on a table and ask you to draw), the teacher told us to remember that at the heart of the word “artifices” is “art”, and to not put them aside as “just deceptive tricks”. The latin roots say it all: artis facere, to make art. As my buddy would say: “Nuff said”!
The third cliché is the use of Symmetry. Again my friends from the professional side of the design aisle shun this. As far as I am concerned, I owe it to myself to see what my design will look like as a symmetrical composition first. Then I can try a few lopsided versions. Most of the times I find out that troubleshooting the unbalanced design is not really worth the time. If symmetry works, by all means use it! It worked for God. And as my buddy would say…
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Blog post by Tatán
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