Graphic Design

Graphic Design is the commercial end of the world of art.

Three basic tools of graphic design

• Type (Typography)
  • Science and art of letterforms
• Photography
• Illustration

Logotypes

• Concentrated succinct image of a company’s business (trademark or logo) that says without words what that company is.
  • Most IMPORTANT thing about a logo is it needs to be SIMPLE

• Combination Mark
  • A logo/image with wording
    • The logo type has personality, and it represents the personality of the company

Corporate Identity/Branding

• This is the recognizability of the business
  • The trademark

Different things you can do in Graphic Design

• Package Design
  • Ex: Food and beverage boxes/packages etc.

• Editorial Design
  • Ex: design of a magazine article

• Poster Design

• Web Design
  • Effective web design must be simple and easy to navigate

• Advertising
  • Advertising often uses comedy to get people to like/buy their product

Sequence a Printed Work goes through 

Say you work for an ad agency, you would work under a creative director. The creative director tells designers what to do. The Graphic Designer is the talent. This is the process the graphic designer does to create a printed work

• Concept/idea
• Create a thumbnail/ preliminary sketch
• Make a Rough Comp (comprehensive)
  • Color, size, type, photo, etc.
• Make a type comp (refined and precise image of what will print)
  • This looks exactly like what you are going to print. At this point it is approved by the person it is being printed for.
• Mechanical/ Paste Up (information given from the designer to the printer)
  • Best if they have a symbiotic rather than an antagonistic relationship. You have to collaborate together because graphic designs can be hard to print, and the printer needs to feel like the job is reasonable.

Four Color Process/ Offset Lithography

• Method Printer uses. Takes a mechanical picture, then the printer does color separations.
• CMYK is four color printing
  • Red=Magenta
  • Yellow=Amber
  • Blue=Cyan
  • Black=Nior, or Key Color
    • Subtractive Color
    • Color Source is Ink, absence of color is white, equal amounts of primaries creates near black.
    • Color is translated into dots. colors are layered on top of each other until the image is complete
      • Is offset Lithography because it is done on big aluminum plates
• RGB Printing
  • Additive Color
  • Color Source is light, absence of color is black, equal amounts of primaries creates white

Typography

• The art and science of letterforms
  • Type has a tremendous variety
  • Type has personality
• Font: all the characters of a certain typestyle
  • Upper case, lower case, lining figures ( ?*()&^%$'”:;{}_/#@! )
  • All fonts are not created equally
• Four Different Categories of Type
  • Serif
    • Has thick and thin strokes and serif (the things that stick out)
    • Easier to read for smaller text, used in body copy
    • Fairly traditional and common
      • Ex: Times, Century, Palatino, Garmond, Bodini
  • Sans Serif
    • Plain, strokes have even width
    • Used for headlines
    • Fairly traditional and common
      • Ex: Arial, Century Gothic, Gill Sans, Lucida Sans
  • Decorative
    • Ex: Blackmore, Cracked, Papayrus, Playbill
  • Script
    • Ex: Edwardian Script ITC, Kunstler Script

• Measuring Type
  • Use Points and Picas
    • Pica= 1/6 of an inch. There is 6 Picas in one inch
    • Point = 1/12 of a Pica. There is 72 Points in one inch

• Type Alignment
  • Ways of aligning type in columns
  • Flush left, flush right, centered, justified

• Pay Stub
  • Elements positioned according to a “Grid System”
    • Grid system is also on  a computer screen, an aid to help graphic designer compose his page

 

Terms

• Demographic: the audience
• Leading: space between lines of type
• Subliminal: hidden, below the surface
• Weight of Type: the thickness and thinness of type
• Letter Spacing: how close the letters are to each other