After reading through the first six chapters in ‘The Non-Designers Design Book’, I learned many things that I did not once know. The main thing I picked up on was the four basic design principles. I never thought about it in detail before, but in order to make a piece of writing look good and more professional you have to factor in the four principles which are contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. Without these things, a piece of writing will look very dull and boring, or sometimes even messy and frustrating to read.
The first chapter just talked about all of them in general, and how they complete one another. The second chapter talked about proximity. I never once knew, but soon learned, that proximity is grouping related items together so that the piece you are creating flows and the piece is seen as “one cohesive group rather than a bunch of unrelated bits”. This chapter also stated that groups of information that are not similar or related to each other should not be near each other. Everything in this chapter seemed to be all about organization. I didn’t even think in depth about this until further reading into the chapter.
The third chapter talked about alignment. The most important thing I learned from this chapter is that when creating a written piece or an advertisement of some sort, I cannot just throw words or phrases on the page without having proper alignment. I thought it was cool that the book described it as the “slightly-messy-kitchen effect” by pretty much saying that you can get overwhelmed if you walk into a kitchen and there is things all over the place. But if you walk into that same kitchen and everything is organized and in its place, you feel more at home.
The fourth chapter talks about repetition. From this chapter I learned that I am supposed to repeat some aspects of the piece that I’m working on, basically to get the audience’s attention and bring out pieces of my work that are more important. There are many different ways that I could choose to be repetitive with my piece, including using a certain font that is interesting, using a different colored font, making something bold so it stands out, etc. I learned that repetition is not only important to make a point, but also it is important to make the whole piece of work unified.
The fifth chapter is about the concept of contrast. I learned that contrast is basically created by combining two elements that are different to make the page pop out or stand out in a way. It makes the reader want to read on, or at least gets them interested in what they are going to read. I also learned that the only way to make the contrast work is by not being a “wimp”. The book states that you cannot contrast the color brown with the color black and expect for people to see the difference or want to read on in your piece of work.
I believe the reason why we are studying design in writing in the professions because design makes a piece of work what it is. Design is going to be in everything I do for the rest of my life, whether I want to believe it or not. Although I am not any kind of design or art major, there are still going to be times throughout my career as a community health major that I am going to have to use the concept of design in my daily work. I’m not even positive what I want to do with my major yet, which is another reason why I’m happy that I’m learning this information now. You never know when it could pop up in your future, and I personally am glad that I learned these four techniques.
Good post. Thanks Hannah, and you are right that how a document looks (design) is always part of the task.
ReplyDeleteI also learned a lot from this reading. When creating some kind of visual document I usually had these principles in mind but I did not consciously think of them in the way that they were presented in the book. I think this reading will enhance the way I design things from now on by making me conscious of what I should be doing in terms of design.
ReplyDeletevery good reading of the chapters, it is surprising how many of these principles discussed we use on a regular basis without even thinking about what we are doing. in being able to realize this basic concepts we are really able to do a lot more with the look of our writings and visual pieces.
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