Articles in this section:
Digital tools for graphic design
The publishing process and the way texts and graphics are prepared of printed or digital publications have changed completely in the last two decades; digital systems have completely prevailed.
The essential programs for a desktop publishing work flow —the digital composition of documents in a computer— are:
- Page layout software, such as InDesign, Pagemaker, QuarkXpress. Some more domestic alternatives include Publisher from Microsoft or Serif PagePlus.
- Illustration Applications (or vectorial drawing programs) like Illustrator, CorelDraw or Freehand.
- Image / photo editing utilities, such as Photoshop and Paintshop Pro.
There is a tendency towards overweight in most programs, increasing their feature list, so in many cases it would be possible to perform tasks from almost any of these three categories within a single given program. The consequences of this featuritis is a profusion of monster programs, resource-hungry and prone to slow down your computer, which sometimes make you long for your older, simpler and faster versions, more focused for specific works. We will be discussing these programs and what they offer us in the second section of this part of the manual.
The way we work and the file formats we will be using depends on the final output, if it is a printed publication or a document to “hang up” on the net. We will discuss how to acquire and process images and the necessary file formats in Digital Illustration and Image input.
There’s a good way to understand how has the traditional idea of publishing changed in the few last decades. Today’s books, bulletins, magazines and other publications owe a lot to the digital technology, even in their design solutions. And there’s a whole new way of understanding publications in the online world, the www. New systems of electronic publishing have become very common; not only the usual web pages and web applications, but also auxiliary electronic formats such as Acrobat PDF —portable document format— which has been constantly repurposed and rethought, with new and interesting qualities. We discuss these formats in more detail elsewhere in this manual.
Finally, you’ll find lots of useful links in the manual to learn more, see interesting examples of graphic design, and get clipart, programs and other elements.
Designing with common sense.
When we analyse the main elements of graphic design with digital media, we deal with graphics handling, text edition, colour... and their combination, how to put it all together as a whole that works. See the full list of articles in this section (the same goes for every section in this manual, of course) in the top left part of each article.
Working in digital design, one of the main problems with so many possibilities near at hand, es wanting to do it all, everything at one and mix it together. This leads quickly to chaotic results. It’s hard to resist. Even when you prepare a simple document there’s the constant temptation to use more: more colours, more fonts, more images, more different resources. You feel like a child who has been given a huge colour pencil box.
But we must keep one thing in mind: even if it’s possible to use thousands of colours, hundreds of fonts, dozens of special effects, and do it all at once, combining it in a million ways, it doesn’t mean that we should do it. Out work, our publications, musn’t look like a paint colour catalogue, or a circus poster (unless we deliberately want to achieve those effects for a special project.)
We should always consider some clever, basic rules in design. You know rules are for breaking in certain cases, but first you must be familiar with them and at least, if you ignore some of them, it should be by will, not because of your ignorance. Simplicity, consistency, a good layout are always a guarantee of good results. They are so today, as they were in the pre-computer years. Here’s a very quick list distilled from the recommendations of different graphic designers:
- Design must serve the content that motivates it, and it must be created according to content.
- Design should be well organised or structured.
- The different elements in a design must show contrast: a kind of contrast that, while letting the user differentiate them, still keeps the whole design as a unity.
- The key elements and interest centres must be emphasized.
- A good design often is the simplest alternative.
- Try always to keep consistency in a design project.
Before attempting to do something with a design project, most professional designers first visit the library or the bookshop and get some reference materials. They elaborate their first ideas on paper, try to list as many ideas as they can, then select the most promising ones, and only after this preparation phase they begin what you could call real graphic design work.
If you really want to get into graphic design, you should start your own design library. There’s a vast number of books about creativity, illustration, typography, graphic design, specialised software books, artists and designers monographs, etc. and then you have a good offer of websites. In the articles of this manual we make some recommendations of both kinds of resources.
