A trend I see in a lot of new designers and even more often in clients, is that they don’t understand that less is more. You don’t need to have your entire company’s history, the name and face of every single employee, 15 different colours, and absolutely no white space for people to understand what you do. Say you’re a construction company, do you need to have 10 construction workers, the yellow and black stripes of construction signs, a construction site and every single bit of equipment on the same ad? No, just take one element and make it work..
Heinz Ketchup has this wonderful ad which is at least 50% white space, and it works. You might not get it at first glance, but if the image is interesting enough, almost everyone will spend the extra second to figure it out. On the other hand, an image that’s too busy will be overlooked entirely.
Just remember, just because you have a design out there, doesn’t mean people are going to stop and look. You have to give them a reason to. A trick when examining one of your brilliant designs, step back and say, “if I saw this in a magazine/website/banner/whatever/ and I had no idea who had made it, would I still like it?” Then be brutally honest with yourself. Truth hurts, but that’s the only way you grow. Please, please remember, white space is your friend and doesn’t need to be filled in with pointless images.
BTW, if you’re wondering why I’m not showing examples of bad design, it’s because I don’t want to accuse anyone of doing bad work. This would just cause trouble, and I’m not one for trouble. If I decide that I need to show an example of what I would consider bad design, I will make it myself. Hope that explains.
Oh and sorry about the lack of tutorial today, I will try and do one for tomorrow.
maritimexpat Said:
on July 11, 2008 at 2:12 am
I think perhaps an illustrative analogy would be in how one decorates a room. Now, a teenaged girl, or a college guy, might have every single inch of their wallspace covered with images clipped from magazines, or mass-produced posters, or sometimes for that extra indie ‘edge’, a free (-ly swiped) playbill from a local rock band that one probably didn’t even go see. They will do this in the name of ‘expressing themselves’, and to a certain extent, it will be true, but it will also lack taste and be quite jarring to stumble upon (among other shocking things that go down in teenage/college bedrooms).
On the other hand, when one is actually an adult and is decorated the wallspace of a whole house, choosing art, fixtures, and furniture will be a balancing act of (under)statement, pure aesthetics, and function. This is good decoration, and the same principles will hold true for design I imagine.
archedtype Said:
on July 11, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Nice analogy. Sadly I think I fall into the mismatched furnature, nothing on the wall, dishes growing new exciting entities category. One of these days I’ll enter adulthood.
Mostly I’m just waiting till I can afford to design the place. The dirty dishes could change… but that’s another story.
Oh, and there are some who can pull off the crowded look. David Carson is famous for doing just that. So I guess it just depends on what your intended statement is and if crowded is the best way to make that statement.