Graphic Design Fundamentals: Layout, Color & Typography Masterclass

I'm reading my 20 years experience as a professional designer to share with you the fundamentals of graphic design

layout color topography in this Mammoth 3our compilation we've created my most valuable videos on the subject videos

which have already enjoyed over 1 million views into a collection which will take you from Total beginner to a

designer who's familiar with the essential principles we'll cover how to choose fonts and types set them how to

select colors using grids key design vocabulary and many other tips along the way first up are my nine principles of

layout the concepts that inform any successful composition this is the first in a

series of videos on the principles of layout and in this lesson we're going to cover the first three ideas with

examples just as a musician learns their instruments so they can more effectively share their Vision these principles

provide uh boundaries within which creative expression can happen they're not designed to limit your creativity

but to provide the opportunity for expression while still allowing you to fulfill the brief you've probably heard

of these and we'll get into some more of the less talked about ideas in later videos but it's amazing how often these

basic principles are ignored resulting in ineffective or just plain ugly designs so I'll introduce these three

concepts very quickly and then show you how they all work together in tandem with some examples number one is focal

point and this is the center of Interest not necessarily the center of the layout and this is the location to which your

eye is drawn so for example here we have a white circle and it's right in the center of the layout but if we move this

to the side it's still the focal point now obviously when you're watching this video you can see me as well hello but

considering this layout it brings you over there even if we have multiple elements within the layout we're drawn

to the filled Circle rather than the stroked ones it's solid it has more presence so that's a focal point could

also be where things meet so here the point at which the two lines intersect is the focal point and you see this in

things like photography so a well-known principle about focal point is the rule of thirds and photographers are taught

to do this early so in this image the bird on the left is placed in the center its head is placed in the center center

of the frame vertically and horizontally whereas on the right not only can we see more of the bird but the composition is

more interesting because it is placed along these grid lines so that um its head or kind of that that point of

weight around the neck is placed in the top third horizontally and the right third

vertically and it makes for a more interesting image than the one where it's just in the center and you can

apply this this to layouts too and we'll see that as all the principles come together at the end but let me give you

these quickly number two is whitespace and this means a quiet areas of visual rest which give you other elements room

to breathe and we saw this in the photograph of the bird the Blurred out background here provides the white space

white space doesn't have to be white it just has to be a a quiet area and that allows us to focus on the part which is

sharp and in Focus which is the bird itself so just as music needs Dynamics that's loud and quiet layouts need white

space the impact of the orchestra at full volume only works in a room where the Acoustics are sufficient that the

orchestra can play quietly and softly and uh we have that different feel and then when they burst into life with an

incredibly loud powerful Dynamic it has that impact and it's the same with the layout areas of quiet areas of white

space allow other elements to come to the four and it makes them more interesting it makes them easier to

navigate around as well and the third thing before we bring these all together is hierarchy so this means giving

priority to the most important elements if everything's loud if everything's on 10 again like music then nothing is

emphasized when you're mixing a track you can't just turn up everything louder just makes a wall of noise so some

things have to come to the four like when you're listening to pop music the lead vocals in the four and some things

have to be more to the background and sense of hierarchy and it's the same visually now this is design 101 I

appreciate that but how often is this ignored in the real world you want to orient your user that means let them

know where they are and then lead them on Journey if you go to a a map maybe you're walking around a city as a

tourist the most important part is you are here so they need to be oriented and be able to get their bearings of where

they are the layout where North is perhaps and then where they want to go and with hierarchy there's obvious

things like headlines tend to be more prominent than body copy uh but let's have a look at some examples so here on

this hero section for this website the dominant element the focal point is the camera and let's just annotate this the

camera here so this is the dominant element this is the focal point and then there's plenty of white space around the

image but also around uh all the copy and such so it allows you to to uh to read it it gives parts of rest within

this composition and the headline here is clearly more more prominent than the body copy underneath and so there's a

clear hierarchy to it as well as a clear focal point so maybe with this next uh layout similar with this next website

again so this time we don't have just a plain background the photograph fills the entire background however there's

still clear areas of white space within this Photograph it's nicely composed so that the cliffs really stand out because

the Sea and the sky give those uh White space areas but then within the quiet areas there's been space to place the

logo the navigation the headline and the call to action very clearly so we see this image we get this feel and then we

read the headline and it gives us a sense of the kind of website that we're on uh straight

away similarly with this magazine layout we see first of all the focal point this big photograph which expands over from

the right onto the left Page um of this Arch and as you're flicking through the magazine this catches your eye as a uh

an eye-catching uh focal point for this photo essay so it's going to lead you into that so you see the picture and you

get a sense or this is going to be something from this American Wilderness which it is then the headline is clearly

uh more dominant than the body copy and there's also areas of why space not every cell within this grid has to be

filled and that gives chance um for there just to be more of a sense of rest and it gives it a more of a premium

relaxed feel to it as well now we can see this these are madeup examples okay that are quickly put together but you

want to train your eye and be so that you are aware of these principles while you're learning and so that when you

look at a layout you can see them at work and you can understand uh why a skill designer made the decisions that

they did so let's look at some real world examples so this is the hero section on the figma

homepage so straight away we see the headline it's at the top it's big it's bold now I've got a massive 5K screen

here so we see quite a lot of the image but maybe on a smaller screen you just see a little bit of the screenshots here

at the bottom uh below the four but we see the headline and there's plenty of white space around it and things are

sensibly placed and they're not crowding each other so we get the concept of what figma is about they're making their

unique selling proposition the collaboration aspect so that's very clear at the top uh and it leads us down

through this same with web flow very similar they have a headline with with figma it was black on white here with

web flow it's white on black or very dark and that's very clear and it's not

crowded out by imagery the site you want without the dev time their value proposition is very clear and their logo

is appropriately uh small there's enough clear space between they make their navigation very simple as well it's just

a login or register so that you are drawn to these key elements and they're able to get across their value

proposition before encouraging you to scroll down the Page by showing you within the app now you're probably

thinking these are both in the design community of course they're going to have great websites and more importantly

they're going to observe just like very basic principles of design but what about the Panton

website I mean what is going on here like I come here and I don't know where to look there's so much going on I've

got to work I've got to force myself to to look around to to figure things out what is the focal point here

perhaps the light Booth over on the far right it could be this but we've got this type in the

center so that's like in the center at the top so I'm sort of drawn to that but then the biggest headline is here so I'm

not really sure I'm kind of all over the place and this hero section uh which is actually a carousel so these are

rotating uh which will distract you uh even more so I've decided take a screen grab for you guys but then below we've

got like a big solid rectangle here so this is very heavy and this has got like one 10 images in the thumbnail for this

video next to something on a colored background I mean this types in all caps and colored up two things that make type

harder to read just so much going on it's close to this now so it's competing so if they

were just go back to these very basic principles focal point hierarchy wh space if they were observed and panton's

value proposition in the sense of their brand came across I mean this is a brand for designers exclusively fashion

designers interior designers graphic designers so it needs to look good it needs to feel good and Panton do a

really good job with their products and their merch and that's not coming across in their website and yes they have

products they need to push and things they need to talk about but that could be done in ordered grid layout step by

step throughout the website or through a easily uh navigable menu but to arrive here this as a

layout is uh an example of somebody not observing the basics I've got three more principles

for you in this video number four on our list is grouping instead of spacing elements out evenly gather things that

belong together this helps a reader make sense of the information we commonly see this on websites so the navigation often

appears at the top the items are together and here we have this on the dribble side next to the dribble word

Mark navigation to the different areas in the top right we have some separate items group often you get a search or a

sign in or a basket on an e-commerce shop then below that we have the hero section we have have their offer their

proposition explore the world's leading design portfolios headline and a by line and a call to action with some imagery

next to it white space around it clear focal point is the headline things we talked about in part one and then below

that are what they call the shots all the uh different uh designs placed in a grid so there's a clear grouping there

of the navigation to together at the top then the hero section and then the grid of content below it and that might seem

quite obvious but it's it's something that often when you you you have a lot of information from a client uh you need

to do and it will help you graphically make sense of things there's a lot of messy posters out there but in this one

this poster has a prominent headline the artist name and the Practical information is grouped together at the

bottom the ticketing information on the bottom right and the when and where on the left and this helps emphasize what

you want to emphasize and it also makes use of the next principle which is scale now a good way to example the uh explain

this sorry and Rand did a great little short on this is if you have uh three elements that are all the same size a

better way a more interesting way to present them compositionally is to have one large one medium and one small to

have things at different scales so that is shown in these posters by the American studio

dkng and this gig poster for Jack White the illustration is the large element the arst name medium and the information

at the bottom small and the Sim similar composition is followed this next example this poster for the decemberist

and lovely illustrative work but the composition is really vital to making these things work and that sense of

scale makes it more interesting more dramatic more aesthetically pleasing so employ large contrasts in size if you

want to add drama try huge headlines or small captions on images or full bleed images next to layouts with lots of

white space these sorts of tricks you see in uh fashion advertising things like that I mean just grab any design

mag or fashion mag I got Port magazine here in the studio and like the first advert sprad

when you just open the inside is this Hermes ad and we have a lot of these principles we've talked about here focal

point the model uh employing the rule of thirds uh there that we talked about in the last video but also scale so this is

a full bleed image but it actually almost bleeds off the edge you know cropping uh off the model's head and

body but then this small caption here helps emphasize uh that element of large scale so try out these kind of things on

the web something like Apple's website the iPhone 13 Pro page we have the scale of the phone at this huge macro size um

something more visually interesting and as you go through the site you see like the scale of the

close-up shots uh with shots of the entire device with white space around it and as you move through a play with

scale we have larger type uh for a paragraph or then we have this area where we have a dramatic difference in

point sizes to produce this dramatic effect the headline is much larger type size than the body copy here and we also

have this uh scale principle of large the photographs medium the headline and small the body copy and this site also

we we we'll go through it in a moment makes use of the sixth principle which is sequence now a video editor

understands the power of sequence how you transition from one shot to another do you go from a wide shot to a closeup

uh the way things are moving if they're moving from perhaps left to right how does that affect the next shot if

they're then moving from right to left will that feel a bit disorienting and a movie that is edited well tells a story

and it leads us through and the sequencing of shots is really important to that and we need to think about that

too as designers when it comes to layouts so if you're leafing through a welld designed coffee table book uh you

have this cinematic effect because the layout moves around uh whilst leafing through although it's perhaps all or

should probably be designed on the same grid but that little bit of moving around adds that visual interest it

makes it more cinematic and web designers should think similarly about a user scrolling down a page so each panel

uh whatever's in view in the window shouldn't be considered in isolation but it should work both in isolation and as

part of a sequence uh telling a story so let's have a look at that on uh a couple of websites right now maybe first of all

with that Apple website for the I3 Pro and as you scroll through you see these principles of grouping obviously the

menus group together at the top and things like that uh but even the little you know links and things and the idea

of scale we go huge type and then we have smaller type on these captions and the idea of sequence each panel uh looks

well by itself you know the device dramatically on this big white field uh but then we move into uh full bleed grid

and again we have those scale of the the closeups and the full wide shots uh on each of these rows and as you move

through the layout's moving around and we have have all these principles employed but the sequence is telling a

story and by being consistent with this very simple black and white color scheme just using one font and you know uh the

consistently uh cropped images and such like that but it allows you to have that consistency but also interest because

the layout's moving around now we've got overlaid images uh which is a new element you know we've got different

color backgrounds as we go through and they each look strong as uh they could almost be posters each

individual uh panel but they also sequence in this uh really interesting way because it continues to move around

and keeps the reader engaged uh with the page let's have a look at something with maybe a little bit more of a a smaller

budget this side stand with Ukraine and this is about uh sharing information uh from the war and we have

these principles here grouping obviously we've got a top menu then we have sort of a navigation through the site here

across the middle and and the sort of information on you know the time at the moment in keave and how many days the

war has been been going on and such like that but these other elements of scale and sequence are particularly done well

on this site so as we scroll through we see these images uh you know come into view but underneath as I I

move these speech bubbles out the way uh we see a a large quotation in the background so there's a definite

difference in in in point sizes here and again they're using sort of larger paragraphs next to smaller captions and

then we have this huge date in the background which is bleeding off the page as we scroll the 24th of Feb comes

into view and even the composition with these images uh moving through you know they off axis you know bringing a little

bit of Interest following the rules doesn't mean you know boring boxy layouts and I think this uh shows here

but it's an element of of sequencing it feels this storytelling like these images being thrown down on a table or

something it feels like uh this thing is developing day by day as we are learning more about the story exactly what is uh

happening it's really clever actually this site I recommend you you check it out there's this little um if I can get

the menu to appear at the top here you can switch over to Russian truth instead of world truth and you can see sort of

the alternative narrative uh that's going on and these you know quotes from Vladimir Putin and this kind of thing

and their images uh from from uh the scenario so uh really interesting site we'll put a

link to that down in the description but uh let me encourage you to think about as you're looking at your own designs

and as you're observing other people's designs to see these principles in action number seven is alignment and

you'll see all these come together at the end but alignment is arranging items on vertical and horizontal axes so with

body copy we generally want to align that to the left that should be default that looks the best most of the time you

only have the rag on one side and it's the most legible it's the easiest for people to read now you can Center align

for short sections uh that can definitely work write alignment occasionally for compositional reasons

for very short uh sections Justified text wouldn't generally advise it on the web can work in print but you need to be

a skilled uh designer to fix all the rivers and different issues that's created in Justified text so you need to

be a good typ Setter to do that so in general we left Aline and with all other elements there should just be some uh

element of decision making seemingly random alignment looks amateurish now we can have compositional ele uh alignment

for headlines so everything doesn't have to be you know Barrel straight down the left or centrally you know headlines

that are seem to be like off axis on different lines or different angles and things can definitely work if it you

know fits with these with these other principles but I'll show you some bad examples later as well as some good ones

and hopefully that'll help uh bring it all together uh let's have a look at a website where this is done well and this

is for gly type who are a type Foundry and this is their kiosk where they sell little bits of merch and although this

is a very simple website the shall we accept cookies soon as it's a tight founder we will it the alignment is very

deliberate so at the top where we have the name gly Chaos and then shopping bag on the right there is this rule

horizontally which helps uh you know that this shopping bag doesn't just it doesn't just float around in space but

it helps emphasize the deliberate alignment it's aligned to the right and it's also horizontally aligned along the

same line these uh navigation to these different items are align to the left all the information here the headline of

the product the price the description Etc is left aligned this button is the full width of the column in this case to

emphasize that uh the layout in columns and you can even see uh with them being a tight Foundry hopefully

they employ these principles but even within this actual uh document you can see these rules that are emphasizing the

rows and the alignment is very deliberate here even uh throughout this document obviously you know with it

being a type specimen they've you know uh kind of used all of the space and and that's kind of thing but they're still

very deliberate some of the principles we talked about last time like scale and sequence on display here you see again

in this type Library the rules everything aligned in a very consistent manner it looks very deliberate even

when you go down to the footer the information uh below the line in the footer is on the same columns as these

products here and it makes it feel very consistent and deliberate and it can be a challenge on the web with alignment

because you have different screen sizes and such and you need to create responsive layouts but each screen size

should be cated for and checked carefully to ensure that the alignment looks right in all these different

places the next principle number eight is balance how do you make things feel balanced well for a lot of people they

do it by symmetry symmetry is often employed because it's the easiest way of achieving balance and Center alignment

which we talked about being suitable for certain formats short sections of text but symmetry is kind of a lazy not very

interesting way of uh achieving balance and again with text it doesn't look the best it's not the best solution for for

longer ranges of text so asymmetrical layouts which is the one below these are more flexible

and they often look more elegant so you simply need to use counterbalancing elements to distribute the visual weight

so in this example of this magazine this composition of this photo essay is more visually interesting than a symmetrical

one because or one with all the images the same size because it's been arranged deliberately to achieve balance so the

model on the right hand page is looking into the layout and is placed slightly to the right of Center within the frame

the her gazes in the direction of the top image on the left Page and then the bottom left image is there to balance

the composition across the spread by adding weight into this area and this layout was created using our final

principle number nine grids command of the grid allows you to achieve all of the above it's the most

useful tool for the designer who wishes to produce an effective layout the structure it creates order it conveys

confidence in your work I grabbed another Magazine from here in the studio took a quick snap of it and you can see

here this grid layout perhaps on display so on the right we have a full page image and on the left page uh we have

the type uh but if I've overlaid you know roughly you know this is an image with the pages folded but you can see

there's a seven column grid so each of the columns of type actually span over three columns three and three and then

the one in the center there's a little box out caption which has then been Center aligned so there's a combination

of different alignment going on here as well we have kind of a center alignment really because uh at the top where it

says big interviews Global the section of the magazine and then below that the headline of the article and the by line

and then that caption I mentioned so they all align on that Central Access and then the columns at either side are

Justified so but we have the balance between the two because it's it's heavy with type and and then this full page

image uh on the other side so so these principles of alignment and balance and grids are here as you cycle through a

later page in this same magazine you see the same grid the seven column grid and again I've done this roughly there's

probably gutters Within These columns that's the the space between each actual uh column you'll see that if you set up

your columns in something like Adobe in design for print or figma or XD for the web you'll have that option of the

gutter the little space in between check out Ran's video on figma that he produced recently if you want to look at

how you set up those columns and and lay out a website but here what they've done is the type columns are actually left

aligned with a rag and then they are two columns wide instead of three as in the on the uh lead page for the article so

they've got three columns of type here you can see how images are across two or three columns on the left Page and they

might span all seven like the one on the bottom left so with a grid you have a lot of options uh

to uh play with in your layout to give interest in the last video part two we talked about sequencing a layout that

moves around as you cycle through gives some interest or you scroll down similarly with the example we showed uh

last time of this coffee table book so with a print or some sort of fixed layout like a PDF or something it allows

the designer to set margins and row H as well as columns in a standardized Manner and that's difficult to achieve

sometimes in responsive design although we saw with a grill type example you know making sure we take care of that

horizontal alignment as well can produce a really pleasing result so every module in a grid doesn't need to be filled it's

usually preferable to leave some empty we saw that in the magazine and we see see that in this book example another

book I grabbed from the studio this is a book on the architect deed you can see just having some white

space allows you to achieve you know a a balanced feel even if it's asymmetrical I mean this layout is symmetrical in

this instance but if you see another spread from this same book this time the image is bleed out over the margins so

there are different options you can have within the grid and having the Grid in position allows you to then make use of

all the principles we've talked about using a grid does not make a good design it's a tool to help you achieve uh

suitable result and tools are brilliant tools what we use you know musical instrument is a tool to make something

that sounds beautiful you know uh a screwdriver is a tool for fixing screws you get the idea so

bearing in mind all the principles all nine principles that we've talked about uh use your grid to to achieve these

things to find you know that suitable Point focal point that white space around it you know group things together

along that grid layout it really helps with alignment and achieving balance and those kind of things but you need to

Bear all these things in mind you can't just uh plunk things into different cells and think hooray I've achieved a

great layout still need to choose you know make decisions about where the focal point is and and things like that

so let's have a look at a poor layout often we see these things think yeah but what about when it's not working what

does that actually look like well it's hard to find these things I had to do a bit of a bit of a Google and uh I found

this one for a student Christmas party and where to begin with this let's see what you can spot but let's move through

these nine principles I mean where is the focal point I have no idea Whit space there's none of it it's like let's

cram more stuff into every little area hierarchy I have no idea what's most important what really stands out I kind

of see Walkabout in the middle which is like a pub a club venue I see Santa I see Chris I have no idea grouping this

would really benefit from grouping remember our nightclub poster from before uh from I think might have been a

previous video we grouped together some of the information the when and where the

ticketing information information this could be pulled together in different sections to help it scale this is a big

problem there's not enough of a difference between the point

sizes now I'm looking at it I'm seeing all these other issues like curing look at the word party just what's going on

with that P and the a but the point size is the scale so the scale of the imagery which is you know is it in the

background is it in the foreground the logo and all the different type too similar there's not enough of a dramatic

difference in scale to make more of a pleasing composition uh sequencing is not really

relevant because it's supp poster alignment what what is this aligned to I have no idea it was kind of a

compositional alignment with the headline but then it's it's all over the shop isn't it balance no just fill the

spaces grids have definitely not been used so it takes a designer to you know really you pull this apart and and make

sense of this and think about what this this poster is is trying to achieve and trying to do I mean you look at um

really elegant design posters like the swifted project from Mike Joyce who's the owner of stereotype design in New

York City and I know you're probably thinking okay yeah but this is for you know fans of music and design you know

kind of obnoxious design fans who look down on the sort of gy you know ghost designs of the the previous mess yes but

these principles are in play and you could do something that was maybe looked more engaging and fun for students who

wanted a good night out while still applying these principles these posters have a clear focal point they

make good use of Whit space hierarchy grouping scale is dramatically employed here the large graphic element El and

and remember last time we talked about the uh large medium and small elements that's what we have on each of these

posters and obviously he's used the grid uh to help lay things out and uh achieving balance throughout these

designs so this is you know kind of a best practice example of how you do that but what about something like you know a

post is one thing how do you do that through a website and bring all these things together I think some of the

examples we've talked about in previous weeks display that but let's have a look at a another one right now let's go to

another website away from this gly type website over to the website for the recent movie let's just refresh it House

of Gucci this is kind of a minite uh to help promote this film and we have that dramatic sense of scale with this large

headline uh and it's very large it fills the page but as we move through every panel uh has these principles in mind it

tends to be you know Center aligned which works in this uh sense but we have this sense of sequence like if we hover

over something other images come through and each panel so each section of the website you know becomes it it's its own

little area and we get the sense of that by each one having you know a panel as we go through so if we click on one of

these costume design there's lovely use of Whit space here to really let this headline uh stand out

it's very clear we know what it is it's this person I guess the person in charge of costume design for the film uh

talking about it here she is she's done a phenomenal job and the sense of scale the different Siz Point sizes as we move

through not too many uh but just varying it from the headlines to the captions uh to the body copy from the interview

obviously they've got phenomenal photography and such but it's laid out again we can see a grid you can see here

the structure uh the gutters here between the rows and columns and these nice box outs and this

is sequences we move through and again you don't need to fill every cell in a grid leave some empty this creates white

space asymmetrical layout so watch how it balances this one was on the left the space here then this image is on the

right right and it all works to really tell a story and give a really pleasing experience

for the viewer because there's enough white space that um it feels calm enough for me to navigate through to spend some

time reading this interview so when you can bring all these elements together that's when you can do things uh that

are really interesting and uh we'll just bring a bit of uh joy to your viewer and your user as they move through your

sites here in figma I'm going to give you a beginner's introduction to grids in digital design then we're going to

jump into some more complicated editorial design style grids so you can follow along here in figma if You' like

to I'm just going to make a new frame for a desktop size

uh frame frame frame and here we can set up some grid so you can see here in the right column we have layout grid so if

we click add it adds a grid in here and this is a simple uh modular Grid it's like a baseline grid of 10 pixels so

it's creating all these 10 pixel squares and this kind of thing can be quite useful for things like apps or when

you're designing given in a website icon design having some sort of Baseline for the size of things so you might have

like a line you know a rule as we call it in graphic design you know that's always going to be you know maybe 10

pixels high and we maybe Use multiples of that so 200 wide 10 high for example for this um shape or let's just add a

fill to that so we can see it that's not white and then you might you know say okay but my buttons they're going to be

a different height they're going to be like 30 pixels high or something like this so if we zoom out and you could

develop things along this sort of Baseline but to give us something a little bit more

useful we also when it comes to something like web design and getting going as a beginner if you click on grid

here you can see there's different types of grids we can also have a column grid and you can choose here the count means

the number of columns so let's type in 12 columns you can change the color here if you want to uh have a different color

for the guidelines for the columns and how opaque or that is we can make it a little bit darker and the type so this

is stretching them across with a gutter a space in between each column the white space here of 20 pixels so we can change

this however we want we can Center it so then now it's not stretching them it's giving it an absolute size so here it's

10 pixels if we change that to 100 you can see how they would stretch across the page like that and we have a little

bit of margin autogenerated at each size now 12 I selected is a common number for columns

and the reason is that when you're creating uh something with 12 columns you can have uh lots of different uh

multiples 12 has lots of factors so here we have got one across so we can whoops we can do this as 12 I'm just

using the command D to duplicate to repeat the action uh so here we've got if we just turn this grid off which is

shift G 12 items that are one column wide each then we would maybe

do something where we had two columns if if I can do this exactly to we've got six items that are

two columns each then we could have three column wide for four items we could

have four column wide for three items and we could [Music]

have six column wide for two items and we could have 12 column wide for one item I've not quite done that exactly

we go and also obviously you could go across the whole uh size of your frame as well beyond the margins so there are

lots of different options here because of all these different multiples that allow you to uh create

things within this grid so when it comes down to creating something more useful you know we might

for example have a little square like this it's not quite a square is it let's make it square

and then maybe have something that spaned over a couple of columns next to it you know may be some tie might be

some points in a in a list something something like that so there's better ways to do these

layouts but we're just demonstrating uh the grids so you can see you begin to you know create

different little things like like this um that different options you might have an

image for example that spans over uh more columns you know to

halfway then some text to the side of it you know using the columns even as as uh spaces in

between you know we could do something that was a couple of rows of

text few rows of text over a couple of columns so you can start to create these different kind of things uh in digital

design so that's just to illustrate the idea of a 12 column grid setting that up in figma how you can use that to make

sure that things are aligned properly but I really want to get into the meat of this video now showing you how to set

up modular grids and then L out your elements so for that we're going to jump over to Adobe in design so once you're

in in design go to file new document we're going to set the intent as print number of pages let's do seven to give

us some to work with facing Pages which is going to turn these into spreads the page size is A4 and the orientation as

portrait we'll start with one column and set them up in a moment the margins again leave those as zero or set them to

zero and we'll set them in a moment the bleed I'm going to make three M just for good practice that's what we should

normally do in print but it's not really necessary for a demo and then click okay then I want you to select the parent now

the parent is the template for those unfamiliar with Ines design so if we draw a box here which is

cyan then that's going to appear as you can see in these thumbnails here on all the different

pages okay let's delete that thing now make sure you've got both selected here you can just click on them hold shift

click on them and then we're going to go to layout margins and columns so we're going to set our

margins now so a top margin I'm going to select as 10 mil just to make this nice and easy and you can see here it appears

at the top of our Pages now the bottom layout I'm I could set this is 10 mil but when you have your top and bottom

margins the same it gives the effect of the layout falling off the page and all margins if I click this make all the

same being the same size it looks very default and we want to add some life into this composition so best practice

over hundreds of years of type setting tells us that we want to change these things so we're going to change the

bottom margin to to 20 or double what the top margin is these aren't exact relationships that you have to use every

time they'll give you an idea of the principles uh the inside margin I'm going to make a

1.5x so 15 mm and the outside I'm going to make the same as the top margin now you can set the columns here but I don't

want to so I'm going to just leave that there and then I'm going to click okay and you can see the one column grid that

we now have and how it's uh sits on the page if we draw like a black box just to really emphasize how this

looks I'll put that onto both sides I'm just going to hold option while I click and drag that over I press W to switch

to preview View and you can see how the area within the margin sits on the page just a little bit more uh interesting

and dynamic than all the margins being the same so now let's set up some columns in fact let's save this thing

and I encourage you to do the same thing we're going to go to layout create guides so I want to do my columns first

and I'm going to select five columns on each page and the gutter which is this space in between the smaller space so

you can see if I change that to something huge see it becomes where we can't even recognize the columns or

something very small but I'm going to change that to 10 which is the same as my outside margins my my outside and top

because I want to just have that feel of of them being the same between the images and such and then the rows I'm

going to do six rows now the gutter here it doesn't have to be the same as the column gutter just as it didn't have to

be the same as the outer margin size you can do whatever you like with this it depends on the requirements of your

layout but as we're learning here how to set these things up I'm going to put them all the same as 10 and have that

nice consistent margin around items here now make sure you fit your guides to the margins that you've set in this instance

if you want to follow along if we do it to Page you see how they move around margins page that's going to start at

the very corner of the page so within our area inside the margin this first cell is going to be a different size to

the next one so make sure that's to margins and the reason I created the guides in here and not in the margins

dialogue box is because I have this option here of removing existing ruler guides and it's easier to I find to edit

via here so I'm going to click okay and that is our basic grid set up now I promised you a combined grid so I'm

going to go layout create guides again and just do some simple things I'm going to select two columns with zero Gutter

and that is going to give us a center line I can see if we just turn the preview on and off on and again align to

the if you do that to the page that's going to be off to the center versus where our main grid is and it's

difficult to see here where is the cell the gutter so make sure that's to the margins and we know we've got a center

line on each page which I often find useful and one more thing I'm going to add another guideline at the bottom to

align my page number two now you don't have to do it this way again but go up to to the ruer here click and drag and

you can just drag guidelines down now I want this the same 10 mil from the bottom so that's 297 which is the A4

size so I'm going to do it at 287 did that move it'll tell me up here it's always

hard with a stylus when you let go 287 on both sides so if I do want that same margin at the top and bottom

just where I sit my page numbers I have that option so let's do that now I'm going to select the type tool I'm going

to click and drag a type area into here and just type in a default page number even number on the

left so I've type 28 I'm going to align this to the bottom and range it to the left when you type selected now it

doesn't really matter what font you use something similar you know around 10 point 9 point something like that is

fine for now for the purposes of this demo I'm going to drag a copy box over here and I'm going to arrange this type

to the right this isn't really an InDesign demo it's a grids demo but I will mention a few things about IND

design um because I know some of you will be unfamiliar with it so that is basically setting up our page numbers

what they would look like so overall I'm quite happy that now

it does look like we're going to have the feel of the margin being the same all the way around but because this will

just sit in this field if I draw this box again it'll be okay because you will still get the feel that

the bottom margin is larger as you can tell here with the page number being a small element with it within there so to

make these actual page numbers what I'm going to do is just delete this or select it and go to type insert special

character markers current page number and you can also see there is a shortcut for that which is option shift command n

on the Mac and that's put it as a because you see this is a parent do it here with the

shortcut a a but if we go down to four and five you can see there six and seven and I'm just double clicking on these

previews our page numbers are in there fantastic now what we want to do is bring in some content and make this a

little bit more interesting so if we select page two and three what I like to do with content is add this in to the

side and have it uh close by so that I can know what I'm working with and the elements that I have to hand so I've

prepared a little bit of copy and a few images so here's a headline this is for our Magazine spread so I'm just going to

put a test text box here let's just bring a a couple of three text boxes and if you want to type this out

you can it's very short I don't need to uh send you this this is just something made up to allow us to do this layout

Okay so we've got this type and then we have some imagery which I'd maybe pull in but I I've just gathered a few

photographs that we're able to use so when I have the content and some idea of what we're working with maybe we'll this

is going to stay small so maybe let's just make these a little bit bigger just so we can get the sense of the

hierarchy that this is going to be the headline these are the droids you're

looking for and then this is going to be like a by line and then we've got the credits for the writer and the

photographs for the article and then we'll probably add you know some body copy with some placeholder text so once

I have that there I like to think about layouts and different options now for this I tend to jump over onto a sketch

pad with a pencil and paper now here I've got a grided pad and I've drawn a bunch of layout

just different options that might work for this now I've got the Grid in mind I know I'm using this five column grid so

because I have some experience of grid layouts I know kind of how it's going to feel how it's going

to work together but I thought about H what if it was a four column Grid or a six column or a five column grid and

just done a few ideas this is always something I can change if you're setting up a new grid for a new project but it's

just to think about some different compositions now even if you're not familiar uh with grids and you're not

really sure where to start it is just good to start to do some layouts based on the things you know the things that

are important well what about the hierarchy the headline needs to be quite big or maybe some imagery maybe that's

going to be the largest thing and in most cases here I've got the imagery is the largest most dominant uh element

then the headline and then everything else uh becomes the tertiary elements so I'm

going to look at these sketches and now do a few different layouts based on these sketches maybe with some boxes

maybe bringing in some of the content and see how we can actually set these items out across our grid I've decided

to speed up this section and add the commentary later because it was a bit slow in real time but other than that

there are no other edits there are no Cuts here here this is my first attempt at laying out elements in this grid so

here you can see I'm doing some type setting with a large headline sub headline underneath and the grid is

really useful at just giving you a place for things to belong things to align to again based on sketches I'm just looking

back and forth here to my sketch pad and seeing which layouts I want to try out you can see here the larger margin at

the bottom and the feel that that gives on the page and just trying different things to achieve balance to achieve a

nice composition within each layout now I'm trying actually spreading over the fold in the middle which is a nice

technique of the photograph going through the fold and again the grid just gives you a nice place to align to

making sure there's that gutter around the tipe so it's still clearly legible trying a bit of a different layout here

with another image and this is again based on a sketch I've got one where there is a a large headline of just one

word that I've decided to span across the full width between the margins so I'm just drawing that out here in in

design made that into curves so I could just bring it to the exact size and then this idea of an image within the grid

that is overlaid with the headline and it just shows you how quickly you can achieve different layouts when you have

a grid because it's suggesting things to you and based on the sketches that you've already got it's very quick to

begin to pull things together and make sure that things are in alignment and achieve the right sort of feel that you

want and the balance that you want on a page I thought now about maybe the next page in the article after the opening

pages with the title you'd maybe have some sort of photo spread have some more copy and want to introduce some more

images so I'm just laying them out here and you can see I've got a column with three rows of images and then the column

next to it with two and this just adds a little bit more interest that I'll just created an example here where is if we

had three and three it's a little bit static looking and it just adds more interest with what

we have on the right and that's the great thing about grids they suggest this kind of thing to you and it's very

easy and quick to set these things up having the correct margins around everything and suggesting this so now to

achieve balance across this spread because the images on the right way over to the right and I'm not using the left

column on the right hand page I've decided to have this image which spreads right off the page on the left and so

even though that it's smaller than the others it distributes the visual weight by pulling something over to the left so

it's distributed across the spread and here I've got the The Columns of text that run down and this was all done in

about 18 minutes like I said first attempt at doing these spreads and this is not finessed if this was going to be

a final magazine I definitely want to add some more detail maybe some little titles for each section but it shows you

how quickly in just 18 minutes you can lay out a few sprad and you can begin to get a feel of how

something will work within a grid and we can add some interest later next up you're going to learn how to speak like

a professional designer but as you've already watched a solid hour just on layout I can tell you serious about

improving your graphic design skills check out our Core Design skills program where I not only teach the fundamentals

of design in a systematic way you'll also have the opportunity to complete assignments and receive expert

personalized feedback on your work from our mentors of flux Academy adding practice and feedback to your knowledge

of the principles is how you really get better there's a link in the description so have a look and see if it's right for

you typography is the art of arranging type to make the written word readable and Visually appealing you need

knowledge of type setting type design and type faces type setting is the process of laying out text on a page to

do this well pay attention to the point size ensuring it is large enough to be legible but not too large you're looking

to achieve an ideal line length because too many words on a line puts the reader's head on a swivel leading known

as line height to web designers is the vertical space between each line of text tracking the overall letter spacing how

far apart each character is from one another and kerning is adjusting the space between a pair of characters or

glyphs you don't need to be able to design your own font to be a designer but some knowledge of type design is

helpful know the features of the tight face is it a serif font that came with small Flex at the end of The Strokes or

a sand serif without serif or a decorative like black letter script or handdrawn type dive into type Anatomy to

help you analyze faces but you should at least know about ligatures that combine two or more letters into a single glyph

ascenders descenders and x height the height from the Baseline of lowercase characters speaking of which what's the

the difference between a tip face and a font the overall design of the set is a TI face for example elvetica but a

particular WID and weight and emphasis would be a font like elveta Canoa bold condensed italic if you'd like to dive

more into choosing fonts I've got a video called how to choose fonts which we'll link to in the description

secondly color understanding color theory is crucial to creating captivating designs that stir and motion

and deliver your intended message you should ensure that you're working in the correct color mode cmk for print and RGB

for digital and be familiar with HSP Hue saturation and brightness think of hue as how we would name the color like

green orange L Etc saturation how intense it is if you decrease saturation you add why these are tints and

brightness how light it is if you decrease brightness you add black these are Shades to go further create your own

palettes by learning about the relationship on the color wheel like monochromatic complimentary analogous

Etc and the interaction of color the perceptual effect of the interplay of different colors when they are placed

together in a composition yoseph Alba's book is the Bible on this if you want to take the next step I also have a video

on how to choose colors composition how elements are arranged in a layout dragging things around at random is not

the best approach adhering to design principles will produce a better result more quickly at design school they teach

you the gestal principles of visual perception originated in Germany in the early 20th century ideas like proximity

similarity closure continuation but as a beginner focus on hierarchy prioritizing elements based on their importance to

guide the viewer's attention if you want to understand nine principles of layout focal point white space hierarchy

grouping scal sequence alignment balance and grids and see examples of each I've got a a three-part video series on that

too because they are terms you should definitely know the fourth area is image editing as designers we often work with

images to enhance our layouts these could be vector graphics which are made of paths based on mathematical equations

so that they can be scaled infinitely without loss of quality or they could be raster images also known as bitmap made

up of pixels like digital photographs for example the resolution the number of pixels per unit area affects image

quality and file size to ensure you're working at the correct resolution for your use case editing can involve

adjusting the appearance of an image like color balance and contrast retouching stacking elements in layers

and cropping removing The Unwanted parts to create the most pleasing composition if you want to go further have a look at

my free crash courses in Photoshop and illustrator web now being a good web designer requires knowledge of how the

web works you don't need to become a web developer but you do you need to know how to communicate with web developers

good luck with that and have an awareness of what's possible on the web responsive design designing websites to

adapt seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices has been mandatory for years now the digital design process usually

involves proceeding High Fidelity visuals with wireframes basic sketches which outline layout and structure

there's lots of acronyms in the world of web like UI user interface U X user experience CTA call to action a

prominent element like a button which encourages the user to do something specific and CSS C cascading stylesheet

and get it right the code that's responsible for the layout and styling of much of the web if you want to learn

web design we have a free web design course playlist here on the channel our penultimate area is print now hold up if

you're a digital designer print remains an integral part of communications and at some point you're going to need to

print something and communicate with the vendor or print designer at the very least be aware of trim lines where the

meteor is going to be cut safe area keeping key elements like text away from the edges so they don't get lost and

bleed allowing your artwork to extend beyond the trim area to prevent small white borders showing throughout the

edges due to the slight irregularities that occur when the paper is chopped after all this you might end up with PMS

the Panton matching system which is a standardized color Library ensuring accurate reproduction they produce these

books as well as fabric swatches for fashion and all kinds of other stuff it's the industry standard and if you're

a graphic designer then get familiar with different printing methods too so at the very least you know what's

possible for your clients graphic design movements and styles in any field you need to know some history and keep a

breast of Trends this is true if you're fan of a sport a style of music or whatever industry you work in it's very

difficult to communicate with others without this knowledge like being a basketball fan today but never having

heard of Michael Jordan so this is going to be a very quick tour but here are some influential movements every

designer should be aware of art Nuvo an artistic style from the turn of the 20th century characterized by organic forms

and ornamental motifs inspired by Nature bow house originating from a German Art School between the world wars bow house

embraced Simplicity functionality and geometric design Swiss modernism followed in the post-war era trying to

bring order after the chaos its apologist advocated for the clean grid-based type of graphic layouts which

went on to dominate corporate communication for decades postmodernist graphic design was part of the wider

philosophical and cultural movement known as postmodernism in the latter part of the 20th century it found

prominence and was marked by eclecticism and irony featuring handdrawn elements irregular collages and a disregard for

legibility at the beginning of this Millennium skorm was the thing digital interfaces imitated the appearance of

Real World objects to provide users with a sense of familiarity since then the web has led to an explosion in Trends

which move at an Ever faster Pace although true movements take longer to develop and become recognizable as

such firstly the First Act is before you start you need to answer these questions don't skip this to build a solid brief

number one what constraints do I have there might be brand guidelines there might be limitations of a format for

example in print then nextly what Guidance Do I have is there a written brief already what existing materials

and resources do you have to work with do they give you any guidance in terms of your color choices number three what

do I want the viewer to do so thinking about the action thinking about the purpose of this design and number four

what do I want the viewer to feel what kind of emotions am I trying to evoke what moment is the viewer in when

they're engaging with this design so answering those four questions helps you to build a brief and have some

parameters by which to choose your colors so let's jump into the software and I'll demonstrate how we do this

number one when you're selecting colors is to choose a primary Hue now what is a hue I like to think of this as the

answer a 2-year-old child would give you if you ask them what color is this they wouldn't say Sapphire or Sienna or

mustard they would stick to basic colors like green red blue yellow primary colors secondary colors and that's what

a hue is it's it's the general sort of group uh whereabouts you are on the sort of color spectrum and you want to choose

this based on psychology based on associations based on mood so color psychology is some prology need as a

designer we have a free ebook on this which gives you a basic introduction to the subject and lets you know some of

the representations like red is about passion danger love fire green growth Prosperity Health econscious

sustainability blue trust reliability power relaxation peace so this will give you kind of an introduction to these

ideas but you want to think as well about associations in uh different places different cultures like political

parties where you are it could be religions it could be sports teams they have a particular Association and people

feel very strongly about them so you might be careful what colors you're using in South Central Los Angeles or

Belfast Northern irand or wherever you are there'll be colors to use and colors to avoid depending on the scenario so

being aware of that when it comes to the design and where this design is going to go is an important thing

but I'm conscious that you can't rely on any one element in design just type just color just your layout just your imagery

to produce the desired effect it's all things working together just using yellow doesn't make something optimistic

red dangerous purple doesn't necessarily make it Regal like this example I've got here in an

illustrator the royal family to come across as Regal as Royal they may use purple but everything has to work

together all the elements else it's not going to produce the desired effect so color is one piece of

this so you should have made good progress at this point with this idea of choosing a primary Hue before you've

even touched any software you're thinking about the psychology avoiding any negative associations or joining

with positive ones the mood that you want to uh bring is it going to be a cool color like blue is it going to be a

warmer color like yellow orange red and that should help you think about primarily where you want uh to go with

this and then you want to choose that Hue and then move into selecting a particular color logically

so I'm going to demonstrate that for you so here in illustrator I've got set up these two clothing brands and these are

both econscious sustain able clothing brands that produce their clothing in an environmentally sustainable way and that

is a key part of their offer and their proposition so when it comes to selecting a primary

Hue and then choosing a particular color logically I like to use the HSB sliders which you can see here and this stands

for Hue saturation and brightness so uh you can see how these work you turn on the situation it gets paler what we're

doing there is adding white which which is making a tint we turn down the brightness we're adding black which is

making a shade and so I like to select the primary shoe so do we want red or orange or yellow or green or blue or

purple or pink for this brand well we talked about them being a green we use that as a description in in English if

something's green it's environmentally friendly sustainable so we're going to go for somewhere around like a a mid

sort of a green type color for this brand so then you would apply this and

kind of see what it looks like so this is our primary color I'll make it the type for hip and the background for this

clothing Collective hip is a a youthful young edgy brand for teenagers and uh people in their early 20s clothing

Collective is a more mature brand for people who are maybe in their 40s so here we can see straight away

that we have got this very saturated and bright green and for this hip brand kind of works already it's it's got this like

very youthful feel to it so I'm happy with that clothing Collective not so much it doesn't jive with this word Mark

and what we've talked about in terms of the target audience so we would probably want to

dial down the saturation so it wasn't so heavy probably quite quite a lot and then also with this being a background I

still this is kind of like a mink color now I don't really want that I want a Carmer sort of feel so I'm going to take

the brightness down a little bit too then it's getting a little bit dark now because I've added black so I'm going to

have to take the saturation down even further for it to function effectively as a nice sort of background color maybe

the the brightness can come up a little bit so this is more the kind of feel that I'm going for so for the for ground

which is still black I'm going to select this background so I'm starting from the same place and then just bring the

brightness down and I've got something which contrasts you you might get to the point where it gets a bit too black and

you want to bring that saturation up a little bit so there's a little bit of green in there but I think this just

kind of off green thing so that kind of works for me I'd maybe go even even less saturated

perhaps but we're getting to that kind of idea and this to me works this gives the right kind of feel that we're

looking for it's more subtle with the green thing but they both have that uh green aspect but it's that's proceeding

logically selecting particular colors because we're thinking about the contrast here between foreground and

background we're thinking about what the effect of the saturation and the brightness uh produces a mood so we're

not just saying green therefore we've done the job because it's eal conscious because this obviously next to this

type it looks ugly but with this kind of type setting on hip it works so it's all about the the context and that's how

sort of proceed through using these HSB sliders to find the colors that I want the ne the third of four steps is to

then build a palette so you want to think now about how many colors that you are going to need so how many colors

should you use in a design well you want to think about having options for a background and foreground colors if your

type is going to be um in maybe a certain color I mean I tend to recommend using black for type or white on a dark

background if you I wouldn't diverge much from that too much colored up type that's very saturated becomes difficult

to read so just be conscious of that uh but you know we maybe need something else like if we're I don't know if we've

got a button or something like that we we might want a color for that so let's let's pretend this is a button we'll

just make it look sort of button is with this pill shape so this could work we could also maybe want another option for

a different kind of button or to stand out a little bit more so we might be again pushing our saturation back up

maybe a little bit of brightness just so it comes through and maybe just finding something that's going to you know

really draw the eye uh and and bring us towards it so thinking about where you're at and the kind of design that

you're doing you can establish sort of maybe some more colors some more options through a palette and I'll I'll show you

another option in a moment with uh some more and how we sort of build that palette out but I recommend that you use

uh the fewest amount of colors necessary so if you can only use a few colors that is better because there's less chance of

mistakes and the more elements you bring into any kind of design the more like likelihood there's going to be a mistake

so things aren't going to work well together so it requires some skill to sort of uh build out and use more and

more different elements of different kinds so first of all you can start out with like one color plus black and white

so this is a very effective technique you see it a lot with things like uh books so so like this kind of color

scheme I should say like just like a a red with black and white on this cover got another one here

and this is kind of a common thing that you see you see it with things like signage but also works and there's

certain combinations like red and black and white or yellow with black and white which really works and there's a lot you

can do with it immediately I've got some examples here on the web as well um this packaging

here for Brooklyn Brewery for their pills no longer this is kind of a mustardy yellow this time but again with

black and white and that is a very sharp way of uh doing it Borussia Dortmund the German football team famous for their

black and yellow strip and you see here on their website they've brought that through all the way through so it's it's

very black and white uh with using yellow as an accent for headlines or on some of the buttons and captions and

that works really well Inter Milan another football team they've recently rebranded and they've gone for this very

bright digital blue which was brighter than their previous blue and they're famous for their black and blue stripes

and again this black and blue and white uh really works well together because the white can work over the black or the

W or the blue so they make a big use of that in their interface obviously it's a lot in the photography of people in

shirts but also here the next match is highlighted in blue the following ones are on the black background lot of the

principles here also we talked about in the principles of layout series here on the channel if you haven't seen that you

can see the use of grids here on this website you can see the use of scale with these large headlines combined with

this smaller type and there's some uh really clever layout I really like this website but that's a really simple color

scheme just one color plus black black and white is a really uh effective thing that you can do so what about if you

want to now break out from that well let's look at some other types of color schemes so this is Adobe color and

there are other similar and free tools that you can find online this one's quite helpful because it tells us on the

left these different color Harmony rules in this column so here we've got monochromatic mono means one one color

and monochromatic schemes are where we have a single Hue so if we change this color mode from RGB to HSB we can see

all the way across the Hue is 2 for5 2 for5 that might be quite small on your screen hope you're not watching this on

a phone you want me to see anything H but it's 245 all the way across but it's the saturation and brightness of change

so one color we're using a single Hue all the way across but the variations of that and that's a very simple thing to

do that's what we were just doing uh with our example with our uh clothing example where we used those other greens

they were all one Hue and it was a monochromatic scheme to give us some different tints and shades to allow us

to have different options within a user interface so that's a monochromatic scheme and it's it's important to to

learn the language of design this really helps you as a designer not only in working with other people like your art

director but also with your own thinking once you know the language it helps you to recognize things and and that deepens

your learning so these let's just look at some of these some of these I find a bit bizarre like Square I'm not sure

like to to get into this and apply this but something like analogous color scheme which is colors that are next to

each other on the color wheels so like going from purple to blue or yellow to Green you know red to orange Etc this

tends to give quite a sort of calming feel it feels like these colors should belong together and it's just like a

broadening this kind of monochromatic type feel so it's it's often um easy to do something with this kind of uh

analogous scheme so I quite like this and you can bring these in a bit closer Adobe color allows you to do this and

you can Port these over straight into your Adobe software you can just copy these hex hex references into figma or

whatever software you're using and and and you can go you know sort of wider it's not really an analogous scheme

anymore you know very close just off from monochromatic and and and sort of broaden that so you can play around with

that but that's a nice option I like using analogous schemes easy to make the colors work together another really

useful one is compliment which is where you have colors that are on the exact opposite side of the color wheel and a

lot of popular combinations you know christmy sort of Reds and greens a popular combinations like blues and

oranges or of Darker blues and yellows you see these a lot this kind of looks like

Ikea um so you get these sort of feel uh and these complimentary schemes where you have colors on the opposite side out

of the wheel they give more of a vibrant kind of feel to designs I also like these split complimentary schemes where

you go opposite and you don't go to the exact opposite but either side of that to bring a couple of colors there again

you can bring this in aot little bit and that often gives you some uh really interesting uh options uh when you do

this that's kind of ugly but there in certain places you get some uh different interesting kind of options uh there

with the split complimentary I quite like using that as well so play around with this kind of thing and this will

give you some starting points for building pet so let's demonstrate how we might do

that so I've got a couple of Brands here one is coding Junior which is Hands-On coding camps for 8 to 11 year olds and

then AR FCI artifici it's a terrible name isn't it I just made these up which harnesses the power of artificial

intelligence for your business and these businesses are both in Tech so they have some similar

features but obviously they have a different target market one is aimed at children and parents the other one is

aimed at uh Business Leaders who would have the opportunity to make uh purchasing decisions about uh the

partners and the tools that they use so because they share similar features you can pick up some you might

choose some similar things so if we went through our process so first of all we're going to choose uh a primary Hue

so I'm just going to turn the brightness up so this is off black and saturation so we can actually see the color throw

it around the middle somewhere so I'm going to say blue because I'm going to think that trust is going to be a key

element with both of these things because you want parents to trust that if children are going to a camp that

it's going to be a safe environment and it's going to be good quality education and similarly with businesses uh

purchasing and sharing their information uh with with you know AI computers they want to be able to trust that so this is

going to be a key element so we might want some kind of blue and then so going on from that

would be next to let me just saturate this a little bit more so maybe say here like it's nice to go maybe more towards

the cion I I don't it just gives a little bit more of a just a a nice difference to it a friendliness to it

rather than it being too much of like a royal blue so I would go for something like this and then I would think about

this kind of scheme that I want to use so let's look at this cing junior first of all and maybe you know bring a couple

of do you know what I'm going to do is just snap these things to make it a little bit easier so we talked about

these color schemes so I'm just going to copy uh maybe like a reference here hex reference see if I can bring this into

Adobe color where's our primary one here okay so this is our primary one here and I

like this split complimentary thing because it gives vibrancy like complimentary does

but I'm not sure about these kind of dark orange dark mustard kind of colors doesn't have the vibrancy that I want so

I'm maybe going to split complimentary so I can get more of a yellow in there and uh it gives me some more options as

well because I've got this orange as well uh in there in the mix so let's kind of see what we've got so I maybe

just dial this and this this is where your eye and your taste as a designer comes into this uh there's always going

to be that that element to it however many lessons that we teach I think somewhere around here is pretty cool so

we've created quite an interesting scheme here it's also given us these shades for this yellow and this

orange so I'll maybe just copy in the hex references it's probably as easy as anything for this quick

demo so I've got the this yellowish one and then I've got this orange type one and what you want to do is is

finesse this so obviously we're doing this for the purposes of a demo we're doing this quickly but I kind of like

this it has that sense of like warmth optimism but also you know with the vibrancy you know across these these

colors so I think there's definitely something in this but you'll start to finesse this once you bring this into

your actual usage of where you're going to you know create this on a website or whatever your scenario is I think maybe

is a background color you know I I quite like this so I definitely think there's something to this General

Vibe black so I maybe thinking H is this is this going to be bright enough across this so it's having some some options we

probably wouldn't use this as a headline maybe the orange we'd keep that in darker color um so we'd maybe like this

but we'd maybe want to create some shades and some tints from this so may maybe actually we turn up the brightness

turn down the saturation a little bit and and get kind of a color that'll work better for you know a button let me just

try this it's going to contrast a little bit more from a black and so it's playing around with this kind of thing

you know maybe we want an off black kind of kind of color um that is going to work that's going to give us some nice

options for titling that don't look too black that's maybe it's even still too bright so it's playing around and it's

using it in context so if you've got some illustrations you've got wider parts of your your interface it's just

um playing with that and having fun with that to make that work now we talked about uh this other brand having some

similar characteristics so what I want to do here is i' Maybe start from the same

place and say okay these colors again for this brand but we need to make sure when we're building a pallet uh we have

the right feel and we match these things together so what wouldn't work is when you have things these are all pretty

high on the saturation and brightness uh is when you have things that just don't match up in the in the sort of tone they

look odd and they start to look strange like if we had if we just bring these down cuz this is where I think this

needs to go it needs to probably be uh a little bit less saturated um and this is probably

more slipped there the feel that we want and it is a case of going back and forth on these things and you need colors with

a similar tone so tone is like tint and shade together it's like adding gray so the blacks and whites just kind of

looking like they're in the same place so you can see here now I've messed with this if we do like an rgp red and green

they don't match with this blue and this kind of Goldy beige color here they just do not fit together so we need these

things to all match up now we could make a green work in this scenario but we want to look at what's this like 570

let's start with that and sort of match these up and straight away that feels like it's it's coming in and it's going

to match a little bit better and maybe desaturate it a little bit so it's not competing as much with this blue and and

and it's playing around with these things and when you've got people watching you on video it always seems to

be more difficult and slower but this should give you the sort of idea I'd probably go back to these original

colors maybe the orange and again bring it more where it's it's in that similar sort of space and find in something

where the tones match and this will give you more of the feel that you you're wanting and that and that you're going

for so I think like if this was a a larger Kind of Blue Field then you can imagine more what

this this thing's way going to look like if this was like an accent you can see this sort of color turn this

snapping off is going to is going to work uh as a scheme because you've got a match of similar tones and shades so

we're going a bit less saturated then we are here so matching those up is is really

important if we had don't know maybe this would be part of the design like all these

circles if we suddenly make these different sizes if we like make these red green it

suddenly just looks like really ridiculous but if these can match up in in a similar way we can get something

that sort of feels right it feels like it's in the the right sort of ball park we I didn't have that selected un like

it belongs uh together this is maybe like a you know a blue that would go next to it and so it's it's just taking

the time that one needs finessing but the idea of taking the time to match things up and having similar Shades work

together is how you build whoops these sort of color palettes that are going to hang together and make sense let's have

a look at this in use like on the headspace website we have a Double Split complimentary color scheme where we've

got yellows and oranges across from blues and purples you could create something like this here we go Double

Split complimentary and we've got like yellow and orange I need to drag

this around blues and purples H it's not quite dialing in here but you can see sort of like purple across from yellow

blue and orange and just to point that you do want to finesse these things and they finessed that quite uh nicely and

have various shades of purple and blue and shades of yellow and orange but what you don't see here are really uh Reds

and pinks or greens and Browns we do have a little bit of green in these little illustrations within the app

interface but it's relying more on these key colors with orange being their key brand color and they've clearly jumped

off from that you can get into some more crazier schemes so here we've got this pills

where they've got this sort of uh green on green with a purple and then the uh peach and I think the issue here is that

it might work in some cases sort of on the bottle but in the user interface these colors

there's too much going on there's too many colors and it really it's just too much noise and

it's not producing sort of a pleasing effect o overall I don't really like this olive green on this color here I

don't even know what to call this it's sort of a peachy orange and similarly with this bioma I

really like the packaging even though it's a bit um pixelated this image a bit low res

there's something fun about the packaging it makes it different it makes it stand out it becomes you know there's

a lot of white within skin care and it it gives you something a little bit different and makes it stand out but why

do we need an interface which is pink and yellow and blue and all this kind of stuff going on it really crows it out

and it's just too much much so you don't necessarily just because you have brand colors doesn't mean when it comes to

your job of selecting colors mean you need to select those for the website because it can really be over the top

and not allowing the the packaging to to sing and come through again these things work because the sort of the the the

tones are right even though some of them like this this hot pink is kind of a lot more

saturated maybe than this mint kind of color but the sort of the base colors you know sort of work together and have

this sort of scheme and there's certain colors that are avoided or not used and that's enough but I would encourage them

to look at something like Fender guitars so if we just scroll down a little bit we can see that the finishes of the

guitars are very colorful but the interface is pretty much just uh white black and then red being the only accent

color other than this kind of gray scale black white and gray so whether it's something like a headline has a big red

background just the little titles that let us know where we are or it being the the the you know the point where you can

click special offers or these bits to start a free trial or the company's logo or the button those key elements being

in red uh just help guide us simplifies the interface even though the colors of the guitars are very vibrant we have

this quiet interface around it and that allows us to see where we're going with cowboy the electric bikes

company they've simil simplified this with these colors in the background just pick up on the colors in their bikes or

they've picked colors to evoke the right sort of mood and I feel a lot more calmer on this website whereas on this

site for the um skin products I'm like I don't feel calm doing my shopping I'm it's a it's a bit jarring whereas I'm

enjoying my experience here on this Cowboy site you know it's very Apple like the interface but this use of

colors is smart just picking up on the color of the bike making it a little bit darker for this gradient that looks like

photo paper in the background uh it's just a really smart neat way of doing it and again these tones match from Browns

to earthy kind of olive greens and they've just varied the uh brightness and saturation to get the right sort of

tones for the usage whether they you b a background and and make itself work together so I really like that something

like this site for sweet green want to show you lots of examples people always ask for more

examples this again is just an example of how you can bring tones now this is a bit more uh modern where there's some

bright sort of yellows that do pop out and do look like they maybe don't belong in the palette and there's a little bit

of that um youthful anti-design feel that comes through but overall similar to what we were doing before you've got

dark green text on a lighter green background and these colors the the brown and the green both have that

similar tone to help them work together and this yellowish color which is still green you know so it's within that sort