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© 2000 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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Once in a great while, I receive a compliment on a graphic project. When I thank the person and tell him or her “well, it wasn’t awful,” I am usually accused of being modest.
In fact, not only am I telling the truth, but I am also revealing my primary objective. I know that every so often, I will muster a design that crosses the border into “nice,” or maybe even “attractive.” But I know that if I’m not careful, the chances are higher that I will succumb to “ugly.” My No. 1 goal is to avoid ugliness.
This doesn’t sound very inspiring, I know. When your boss or partner asks you what you learned at this Web site; will you have the nerve to say, “I learned how not to be ugly”? I call it negative motivation, and it is not unlike the dynamic that plays out—usually in vain— between me and my seven-year-old daughter: If you don’t do ________, then this bad thing over here will happen.
The “bad thing” that happens to Erica remains a private matter. But the bad things that happen to your CorelDRAW projects have the tendency to occur in full view of the entire Western world, usually with consequences quite dire to your career.
So let’s take a moment and forget that you ever saw a single advertisement for DRAW. Forget everything you know about the Extrude command, Fountain fills, lenses, Contour, Weld, Meltdown (wait, wrong industry), and every other tool that can cause widespread damage when placed into the wrong hands. There is a very simple litmus test that you should ask yourself about your time within DRAW:
If you can answer in the affirmative, then you can pursue loftier goals. If you answer Yes to only one of the three, or you join me in the 0-for-3 category, then it is simply good design practice to adjust your sights. This is not blasphemy; it is intelligence.
How do you avoid ugliness? Here are a few goals and objectives to think about as you sweat and grunt through the creation process.
One of the most common temptations that wins out is the simple button that turns a string of text into boldface. You do it to one…it looks good…so you do it to another…and it looks good…so you do it again…and again…and again.
Figure 1: This nice logo deserves to have less competition for your attention. |
Bold is a phenomenon of comparison. Something is only bold if it is bolder than the elements nearby. If you make the nearby element bold also, then you have made neither one bold. Figure 1 shows a business card that is well laid out and has a nice logo. But the artist chose to make practically everything bold, and in so doing, has created needless and damaging competition for the logo—the one element that really needs to stand out.
The other temptation that should have been resisted is the use of a colored background, which tends to mute colors and subdue contrast even more. If you want something to pop out, use a clean, white background. Imagine that: make your designs better and make your job easier…
Figure 2: Now the attractive logo clearly gets top billing. |
Figure 2 allows the logo to be more prominent with a few simple adjustments. By toning everything else down, the logo gets toned up, if you will. And ironically, the one text element that I think should have been bold in the first place—the reversed text—was set in roman. Knocked out text usually looks better when heavier.
Figure 3: Can you read the text on this poster? Neither can we... |
Until the computer gods create monitors that can accurately show us how colors will print (and don’t hold your breath), choosing colors for print jobs will continue to be a land mine. And on the road to this purgatory is a rush hour of well-intentioned DRAW users. Figure 3 looked risky even on screen; once it got to print, any of the subtle contrast between the dark text and the black background turned to mud.
This is almost the flip side to the bolding problem. Here the artist knew to subdue the text to highlight the other elements; he just went too far. And for all his good intentions, in many ways his efforts represent a worst-case scenario: unreadable text.
Far be it from me to cast this stone—I am equally clueless many, many times when I choose colors. But I know how to minimize risk, the most important lesson being to never, never choose colors from their screen appearances. Even if you are way off in your color guesses, there are measures you can take to ensure readability:
These are strategies that might seem pedestrian to the professionals, but for we who work in the trenches, they could be life-savers. They ensure that your message won’t get lost in a design tragedy, and they are subtle enough to not be ugly.
Figure 4: No problem with definition of elements in this small poster. We’re sure that there were no pre-press problems either. |
It doesn’t take elaborate design to create good contrast—sometimes all you need is black and white. Witness Figure 4, a delightful silhouette for which the risk of nonreadability is precisely zero percent.
Have you ever embarked on a design project without a clear idea of what you want to communicate and how you want to communicate it? Many professional designers do, too—they sketch and doodle until a central element comes into focus. Others work through concepts before they begin composing, but either way, they know how important focus is to a design piece.
Figure 5: Lots of noise, precious little focus. |
The risk of not defining your focus early on is the likelihood that you will compensate with DRAW’s fancy tools. As if an extrusion is going to make up for your lack of a message. The perpetrator of Figure 5 seems to have subscribed to this belief. Many interesting effects lurk within this hodge-podge, but the forest overwhelms the trees. Any one of the effects might have made for a nice visual element, but the fact that the artist used them all at once pretty much spelled doom to this piece.
Figure 6: Strong visual clarity and effective delivery of message mark this clever graphic. |
Contrast that with the simple elegance of Figure 6, where the artist used white space and one strong element to communicate with eloquent clarity. An added benefit: Figure 6 is one tenth the size of Figure 5.
All of the design magazines like to show off makeovers. But makeovers are dangerous for amateurs, as they promote change for its own sake. In our consulting practice, we look for ways to de-uglify drawings first. Before we consider a makeover, we tear it down. As so many design errors are ones of commission, one of the best things you can do to over-designed work is remove elements and replace them with nothing. You can take this to the bank: White space is never ugly.
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Copyright 2000, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in...
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Mastering CorelDRAW 9
