Quick and easy design that looks good
04 December 2006 @ 18:22 in Tutorials
An impromptu design lesson today, kidlets. Stop
bullying the smelly kid. Listen up.
We're recording the excellent Simon Schama's Power of Art series for my better half to use in her teaching of secondary school art. I trimmed and burned a couple of episodes onto DVD today (the technology side of this deserves another post all its own, but I must focus...) but felt that a felt-tip scrawl on the case would do the content an injustice. So I knocked up a couple of quick covers for the CD-sized jewel cases, and I thought I'd take you through my thoughts so you can see the design process in action.
The key here was simplicity; I didn't want to spend hours on this – the design stage ended up taking less than a quarter of an hour – but I wanted the designs to look bold and strong. Obviously, I was lucky; I had powerful images to hand – the paintings of the artists concerned – but the same technique would work well with well-shot, simple photographs, perhaps with the saturation and contrast bumped up a litle. This meant a basic, typographic solution. The image is the most important thing – it's the most obvious change from DVD to DVD, and is therefore the thing people will 'see' the most clearly when reaching for a specific episode – so rather than box it out or frame it on a white background, I placed it full-frame on the square cover.
The typography should therefore be very bold as it has to sit on top of what could be a very busy graphic. I plumped for Rockwell Bold in this case as it has a nice mix of traditional – with those blocky slab serifs – and contemporary, but anything chunky such as Futura, or Myriad if you wanted something a little less masculine, would work well. Because it's so brawny, the text can be reversed out to white.
To create a visual hierarchy, I knocked the series title back to 60% transparency, and kept the artist's name at 100% opacity; again, it's the differentiator, so it's important it's easy to read. I tightened the leading – the space between the lines – to create a nice solid block of type. Finally, the decision on where to place the text. Bumping the text up to 36pt keeps it nice and legible, and means that the decision on placing the text is restricted to one axis, vertical. That's easy, then. Following the rule of thirds, we simply decide whether to place the text a third of the from the top or the bottom of the image. Ultimately, I just plumped for one option on gut instinct; it seemed to fit better with the images I'd be using. Here's the result:
It's not perfect – it could maybe use a little keyline round the text or a moderately sharp drop-shadow – but for less than 15 minutes' work, I'm happy with them. I hope this has helped you understand the design process behind this deceptively simple design, and that it could help you in your own projects.
If I had been designing for the portrait-format true DVD-style cases, here's how they'd have turned out:
We're recording the excellent Simon Schama's Power of Art series for my better half to use in her teaching of secondary school art. I trimmed and burned a couple of episodes onto DVD today (the technology side of this deserves another post all its own, but I must focus...) but felt that a felt-tip scrawl on the case would do the content an injustice. So I knocked up a couple of quick covers for the CD-sized jewel cases, and I thought I'd take you through my thoughts so you can see the design process in action.
The key here was simplicity; I didn't want to spend hours on this – the design stage ended up taking less than a quarter of an hour – but I wanted the designs to look bold and strong. Obviously, I was lucky; I had powerful images to hand – the paintings of the artists concerned – but the same technique would work well with well-shot, simple photographs, perhaps with the saturation and contrast bumped up a litle. This meant a basic, typographic solution. The image is the most important thing – it's the most obvious change from DVD to DVD, and is therefore the thing people will 'see' the most clearly when reaching for a specific episode – so rather than box it out or frame it on a white background, I placed it full-frame on the square cover.
The typography should therefore be very bold as it has to sit on top of what could be a very busy graphic. I plumped for Rockwell Bold in this case as it has a nice mix of traditional – with those blocky slab serifs – and contemporary, but anything chunky such as Futura, or Myriad if you wanted something a little less masculine, would work well. Because it's so brawny, the text can be reversed out to white.
To create a visual hierarchy, I knocked the series title back to 60% transparency, and kept the artist's name at 100% opacity; again, it's the differentiator, so it's important it's easy to read. I tightened the leading – the space between the lines – to create a nice solid block of type. Finally, the decision on where to place the text. Bumping the text up to 36pt keeps it nice and legible, and means that the decision on placing the text is restricted to one axis, vertical. That's easy, then. Following the rule of thirds, we simply decide whether to place the text a third of the from the top or the bottom of the image. Ultimately, I just plumped for one option on gut instinct; it seemed to fit better with the images I'd be using. Here's the result:
It's not perfect – it could maybe use a little keyline round the text or a moderately sharp drop-shadow – but for less than 15 minutes' work, I'm happy with them. I hope this has helped you understand the design process behind this deceptively simple design, and that it could help you in your own projects.
If I had been designing for the portrait-format true DVD-style cases, here's how they'd have turned out:
