Welcome to our Aesthetics series, where we’ll look at how to improve your visual communication and learn the tricks to make your work look beautiful. Each Principle is linked to a design field, with Aesthetics taking many cues from the world of Graphic Design.

Graphic Design is about designing visually appealing work that conveys a functional message. This is balanced with creating visuals that align with the client’s branding and goals. 

At Nollie, we want to show you design’s transferable skills through the lens of the 12 Principles of Generalist Design. We want you to know that you don’t need to feel confined by your creative specialty and that your creative process is versatile and allows you to try your hand at different types of projects.

What is Generalist Design?

This isn’t something new, this used to be the norm. Creative people would allow their curiosity and skills to guide them into different projects, rather than their specialty. We write about these versatile designers in our Past Masters series, like Scotland’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 

These designers had a selection of work that spanned multiple design fields. How come in today’s society, with all the advancements in education and technology, we see fewer people with diverse skill sets?

After industrialization and the invention of the production line, companies want one person to do one thing very well over and over again. But your creativity doesn’t work for a company, it works for you.

Generalism is returning to other creative industries like Music or the Culinary industry, why are we not following when we face many of the same challenges? You wouldn’t tell a chef they can only cook one type of food, or tell a musician to only play one instrument. We understand how their skills would transfer over, but within design, this way of thinking is pretty uncommon. Why?

Generalism is where the Design industry is going, but we take so much pride in our specialty, that we often overlook the other creative disciplines rather than respecting and learning from them. We have to undo this, for the sake of our industry. Otherwise, it will be lost to companies looking for the cheapest option, and finding that within cheaper outsourcing or worse, Artificial Intelligence. 

By learning from multiple fields of Design, you can build your creative skillset and pick and choose elements you want to use in your practice. This will future-proof your career as you’ll have multiple creative skills to fall back on and will have a bigger picture of Design as a whole.

Why Every Designer Should Learn Graphic Design

Graphic Design is the art of visual communication. Being able to communicate your ideas visually should be a skill possessed by every designer. It will improve your understanding of what makes things look good, and improve your presentations, pitches, and most importantly your portfolio.

Not only will Graphic Design make your work look better. Learning Graphic Design will also provide skills that will transfer into other areas. For example, once you learn how to create Vectors in Illustrator, you can then use them to produce Fashion Design patterns or you can use your knowledge of color theory when creating an Industrial Design project to determine the color of your product.

In this context we want you to learn the fundamentals of Graphic Design so you can learn what makes something pleasing to look at and why. Once you understand these principles, you can apply them to other forms of Design. 

Most importantly you can utilize your Graphic Design skills in your portfolio to present your work appealingly. When you are job hunting, directors will spend less than a few minutes looking at your portfolio. Having a compelling visual language that matches you and your work will help keep their attention and get you to the next stage.

Once you start to understand Graphic Design, you will never be able to see the world in the same way again. Every store you pass, every poster you look at, you’ll notice the fonts and graphic layout and color choice, and the list goes on. 

Your non-designer friends will think it’s weird that you suddenly become so obsessed with fonts. Trust me, I know from experience. Be prepared for how much you’re going to notice Helvetica in your day-to-day life.

A Brief History of Graphic Design

While humans have been using visual communication since we were living in caves, the recent origins of Graphic Design can be traced through typography and the invention of the printing press.

Books were booming after the invention of the printing press, and book manufacturers made their own fonts to print in the books. Books at the time were written with individual letters set on a block to spell out an entire page. The manufacturers of these letters were known as Type Foundries and many are still in existence today.

After the Industrial Revolution, there became a backlash against soulless mass-produced designs, which led to Willam Morris’ Arts & Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts movement was to replace these soulless products with something that had artistic value.

This set off a trend, the Arts and Crafts movement led to a boom in “New Art ” known as Art Nouveau. Which looked back at historical art as inspiration and where we find our old pal, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who was working on a style within Art Nouveau with his friends that became known as “The Glasgow Style.” Art Nouveau forced companies to put more effort into designing better-looking products.

War played a huge role in Graphic Design, as WW1 and WW2 forced designers into creating propaganda. Between WW1 and WW2, styles had emerged from contemporary art, however, these were rejected in the 50s looking to create a neutral style, which was found in Europe’s neutral country, Switzerland.

The Swiss Style became known as the International Style and follows much of the visual identity we follow within Graphic Design today. Simple easy-to-read logos, grid structures, and simple shapes.

The principles have been enhanced thanks to the development of digital software and technology and have created a new ground for creative work.

How to get started

Graphic Design is the easiest way to start learning design. Graphic Design is the most accessible form of Design and the perfect entryway to becoming a Generalist Designer. 

Firstly, a lot of the fundamentals can be learned with just a paper and pen. If you are new to Graphic Design, or design in general I’m going to assume you have some creative flair so this should come naturally. 

Another reason Graphic Design is one of the most accessible forms of Design is that there are countless tutorials, resources, and software that make it easy to grasp. 

You can begin designing as soon as you learn the fundamentals, which we’ll try to cover as much in this post.

What equipment do I need to get started with Graphic Design?

A Design Notebook

Keeping a journal alongside your design work is in my opinion one of the best ways to further yourself as a Designer. I believe they are vital to my career’s success and encourage anyone reading to begin writing as a daily task.

Here you can write down your to-do lists, write project progress, or even just your favorite swear word in all caps if the mood strikes you, which it will. 

I have written before about the importance of keeping a Design Journal. I use a Bullet Journal, as it allows me space to sketch yet still stick to a grid when I’m writing and helps with drawing straight lines for diagrams, orthographic drawings, and measurements. But you can start with any notebook you have lying around! 

Sketchbook

A sketchbook is vital for any Graphic Design project. When you are starting a project, you can use your sketchbook to come up with ideas quickly and messily. 

You should always sketch your ideas first. You can be messy and draw whatever comes to mind. Putting pen to paper is great for your brain, and helps set out what you plan to achieve in your final solution.

In Design the industry standard is A3 Notebooks. It allows you more space to explore your ideas. 

Software

What tools do you need to start improving your Aesthetics?

Adobe Creative Cloud

If you are serious about becoming a designer, then I would recommend learning within Adobe Creative Cloud, with the holy trinity of Graphic Design software, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These software are considered the industry standard and you will be using them in any design agency. 

As the industry standard, many of the tutorials, resources, and learning materials are geared toward learning in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These have been at the forefront of Graphic Design for years.

Photoshop is the best software for editing and manipulating images. Images in Photoshop are based on pixels, which can be edited using tools in the software.

Illustrator uses Vectors to create shapes. Vectors mean that the shape is understood through math so that the object can be scaled larger or smaller with absolutely no loss of quality.

InDesign is used for the creation of Print Media, like Flyers, Pamphlets, and Posters.

Another reason I recommend getting Adobe Creative Cloud is that it doesn’t just provide access to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, but also a host of other creative software like AfterEffects for Motion Graphics, Animate for Vector based animation, PremierePro for filming and Editing, and Audition for recording audio. 

If you are an aspiring Generalist designer, then Adobe will open the possibility to explore different fields much more easily. Adobe is used across Graphic Design, Fashion Design, Industrial Design, and others. Adobe’s software is the dominant creative software and its versatility allows many creatives to create their designs, no matter their background.

Also, as we look into the other design specialties, Adobe will be the common software across many of the principles. Many of the tips and tricks will come from using Adobe software.

Affinity

Affinity is a good alternative for those who can’t afford an Adobe subscription, but there are fewer tutorials and resources to help you learn the software when compared to Adobe.

From my experience with Affinity, their software does much of the same as Adobe, but I struggled to make graphics as quickly as I could in Adobe. I found it pretty frustrating. My workflow took much longer as everything was labeled differently and when I tried to find specific tools, I found out they were unavailable in Affinity. 

Adobe is the industry standard for design software. The interface is different from Adobe, so when you transition into a professional design career you’ll need to relearn everything. This is why I encourage designers to start learning Adobe.

Canva

Ah Canva, the software the professionals love to hate. Don’t get me wrong, I like Canva. I think it is a great way for people to be introduced to Graphic Design. It’s free, you can use it from your internet browser, and it’s very accessible to those who want to dabble with Graphic Design.

But it does not do the same job as professional design software. For starters, it isn’t designed for professional designers, but rather small businesses and content creators who need quick template style graphics.

Adobe now has Adobe Express as a direct competitor to Canva. So if you have an Adobe subscription you’ll also get Adobe Express, allowing you to make the same template-based content.

Inkscape

Inkscape is an open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Open-source software is designed by a community of developers to create free or cheaper software. The issue with Inkscape is the same as Affinity, in that there are fewer resources to learn the software and you will need to relearn them if you get a professional design job.

Gimp

Gimp is another open-source alternative, this time to Adobe’s Photoshop. Personally, I find Gimp very clunky in comparison with Photoshop. The thing with open-source software is that it is free for a reason. Sometimes it’s clunky and any issues you have will be harder to resolve.

What do I need to know?

Typography

Typography is the art of words. As Graphic Design is about visuals, you will need to convey information through text. Selecting the right type of font is essential to help convey the message you are trying to deliver in your work. Each font (or typeface) has different visual elements that make it suited for different uses. 

If you are a beginner, I’ll outline some simple rules of thumb that will help get you started with understanding the basics of typography. 

You should never use more than three fonts in a single design, two is probably enough. There are exceptions to the rule, but you need to know the rules before you can creatively break them. Overloading your work with fonts is a common mistake made by beginners. Massimo Vignelli famously only used five fonts throughout his career, Helvetica, Futura, Times New Roman, Bodoni, and Century. 

Pair your fonts between Display Fonts and Body Text Fonts. Display Fonts are big, bold and full of character. Think of a movie poster, a display font would be the font they are using for the movie title. A body text font would be the less artistic style font used to explain the date of release, the cast and director, and the production.

A serif font has little tips (called serifs) at the end of the letters; you’ll recognize it in more traditional-looking fonts like Times New Roman. A sans-serif font (meaning no-serifs) is more modern looking. The font you are reading right now, Gill Sans, is a Sans-Serif font. These two different types of font have different anatomy. A common practice is to pair these two different styles together.

Helvetica. Designers love Helvetica. So much so there’s even a movie about this font! Its impact can be seen everywhere. It’s become the default font for many practical designs like in airport terminals or motorway signage. If you want to go and find fonts in the wild, it won’t take you long until you spot something made with Helvetica.

Pixels 

Pixels are the small dots on your screen that make up an image. Each dot on your screen can output different colors. The colors are made up of a mix of Red, Green, and Blue light known in Graphic Design as RGB. When you mix all of the colors with light you get white. These dots make up the resolution of your screen.

When you set up a new file in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, it will ask you for the document’s DPI, referring to dots per inch. When designing for web media, you’ll be designing at around 72 dots per inch. This is the resolution of your design.

Pixel-based artwork refers to artwork that is made by manipulating the color of pixels. Think of a photograph you see online, there are different shades and colors in every pixel.

Pixel-based artwork requires you to know the output resolution when creating your designs, as they can’t be scaled. For example, if you take an image with a low resolution and scale it up you’ll see the original pixels become too large and you end up with a negative effect known as “pixelation.”

If you are designing something to be printed, the resolution will be different, as printers have a much higher resolution than computer screens. You would need to set your document to 300 dpi. This means that when you print you won’t have any pixelation and your work won’t look like a retro video game.

You would use a pixel-based design if you were doing photo manipulation and picture-based content.

Vectors

Vector-based artwork uses complex math to understand shapes. Don’t worry you don’t need to factor in the math, the software does that for you.

Being around new designers, there can be a lot of intimidation when it comes to designing vectors. It’s a very different process from creating pixel-based artwork.

For starters, you manipulate shapes using anchor points. The line between two anchor points becomes a path, and you manipulate that path using Curves. The software understands the math between all these points and maintains them as you make the design larger and smaller, meaning you never experience pixelation.

Vectors are made in Illustrator using the Pen Tool. The most important tool for Graphic Designers in my opinion. Once you understand this tool, it will come in handy for other fields of design like Fashion and Industrial Design.

Thankfully there’s an amazing game, The Bezier Game, which allows you to learn the art of designing Vectors with ease. I highly recommend this game to people starting with Vectors for the first time as it quickly lets you understand how this type of Graphic Design works. I remember a few years ago, to train a work experience employee, we raced each other through the levels.

Color 

Color plays a big part in Graphic Design and will play a big part in understanding Aesthetics. As we previously mentioned, screens use red, green, and blue (RGB) lights to make up the colors of an image on screen. For printed materials there is no light source, so the colors are made up differently. 

For printed work, the color scheme used in printers is Cyan (a light blue), Magenta (a vibrant pink), Yellow (yellow), and Black (Called K). This is known as CMYK colors. With RGB, white is the color that appears when you put all the colors together through a light source. With CMYK, if you mix Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow you get Black. The black in CMYK is an extra black that’s added using black ink rather than mixing all 3 colors to make it. This helps reduce the cost of ink, which is expensive.

Similar to typography, the color you select can play a big part in delivering the message you want to portray, this is known as Colour Theory. Color Theory refers to how humans react to different colors and once you know it, it’s another thing you can’t unsee.

Blue is associated with calmness and health, Purple is associated with luxury, Red is linked to passion, Green is associated with food and health, Yellow is connected with Comfort and Convenience, Orange is linked  

Color theory also refers to knowing the hue, saturation, contrasting colors, and complimentary colors. Thankfully there’s another game, Color by Method of Action, which helps you understand these principles better.

Branding

Branding in Graphic Design refers to the consistent visual elements that a company uses. This is known as a Brand’s visual identity and it is the aesthetics element of a larger brand strategy that would cover the company’s name, communication style, and the products that they sell.

A company uses a brand to be recognized. Take Apple for example, you can see their consistency across their marketing material, their stores, their computers, and their phones. Apple has a visual identity that stretches across everything. You can instantly recognize it. 

Branding plays a big part in how people perceive a company, it’s why you decide to drink at one coffee shop vs another. 

Designing a brand can cover different elements like logos, icons, color, and typography. These need to align with the company’s larger brand goals.

If you want to know more about Logo design, we break down what makes a good logo and give a case study into creating the Nollie logo.

Design Specification

A Design specification is an evolving document that you use throughout the design process to ensure your design functions as you want and that many of the factors for the design have been considered. You begin using a Design Spec at the start of a project and use it as a checklist to ensure your final design fulfills its requirements.

A Design Specification contains hard data about what your design does and should be expected to do. It is split into different categories and allows you to look at your design from different perspectives, like performance, aesthetics, and disposal. Data should be as close to the real world as possible and listed with key data, for example, “The color must be light blue.”

Let’s pretend you’re designing a poster for an event celebrating a product launch. In your Design Specification under the performance category, your poster must promote the event. You would list the date, venue, and all other relevant information that needs to be on your poster. It would include the product that is being launched. 

In aesthetics, you would look at the other elements of the company’s brand, and put them in your aesthetics category, like colors being used or typographical elements, like what font you should use. Under Manufacturing, you would factor in the printing of the poster and include the printer’s lead times to ensure everything is delivered on time.

If you want to develop a multitude of creative skills, a Design Specification can be used across multiple design projects and is one of the secrets to building an adaptable design process.

You can learn more about using a Design Specification in this guide, or check out our Design Spec template.

Visual Elements

The visual elements listed here are known within Graphic Design, but play a larger role for Generalist Designers. As someone who wants to explore the different design fields, having an intimate knowledge of these elements will allow you to enhance your visuals across many design projects. 

These elements are universal. While they are used in a Graphic Design context in this post, they also play a major role in Art and Photography. Understanding these principles will help you understand the ways to harness the following elements to create visually striking work, which you can transfer into other elements of your interdisciplinary journey.

Lines

Lines form a big part of understanding Aesthetics. These are the waypoints connect together. You can have horizontal lines, vertical lines, squiggly lines, dashed lines.

Lines play a huge role in Design. If you don’t believe me, you already use lines in a way that is personal and only relatable to you, in your handwriting. Like your handwriting, don’t underestimate lines in your design work. 

In an elite design education, lines should be the first place you should start when you’re learning to draw. When I was retraining in Industrial Design, we spent one month at design school practicing drawing straight lines. 

Lines make up the shapes that go on to form your designs. Knowing how to draw a straight line might seem trivial but it can help you greatly further down the line. Start by drawing two points on a piece of paper and draw a line between those two points moving your arm (not your wrist!)

Shape

Once you’ve got your lines down you can expand to draw and explore shapes. These are 2d elements that can be used to form designs. Shapes are objects made up of lines like squares, circles, etc. You’re an adult, I don’t need to explain to you what a shape is. 

What I do need to explain is how you can use shapes in your work. Shapes are the secret to being able to draw, which will massively help you when it comes to sketching out your ideas. You can use shapes to help you draw anything!

There are the simple shapes, again I’m not going to insult your intelligence, you know what shapes are. But there are other types of shapes you might not be aware of like organic shapes, which are shapes found in nature. A maple leaf is an example of an organic shape.

Abstract shapes are shapes that don’t belong to anything, they’re just weird and don’t visually portray any distinct shape. 

Form

Form is about how a shape fits within its environment. If the shape is a square, then its form is a cube. 

In Design Form is one the most important elements to tame and understand. How do you get something to fit in its environment? As you progress through the 12 principles of design, form will go on to become one the biggest factors that impact your design work, especially as you move from 2D visuals to 3D objects.

Color

Color is how our eyes perceive light. Colour plays a huge role in design. It can be used to establish mood, light and depth to your designers. Colour is best learned through Color Theory, which breaks down colors into different guidelines that allow designers to pick colors that can harmonize and contrast with each other.

Understanding color provides you a fundamental knowledge that you can apply to other fields of design as you build your interdisciplinary skills.

As previously mentioned in this post, the best resource to learn color theory can be found in the game by Method of Action, https://color.method.ac/.

Texture

Texture is how something feels to the touch. Even if your design is a digital visual, it can still be used to imply what it would feel like. This adds another level of engagement between your design and the viewer. 

Adding texture gives users more visual information to make an understanding about your design. For example, if you used a wood texture to a graphic, it would give the illusion that it has been hand carved and manufactured.

In printed graphics you can use texture when deciding the paper to print your design on. This will play a big part in Packaging design.

Space

Space is an often overlooked element of Aesthetics but when used right it can be highly effective. Space refers to the area around your design, sometimes you can design for space to be around your designs. 

One example of this being commonplace is in Logo Design where the text or visuals should be at a certain distance set by the designer. The space is listed in a way that even non-designers would easily understand.

Space can also refer to negative space, which is using the space that isn’t there to add visual elements.`

Value

Value is the measure of lightness and darkness in Graphic Design. White objects have the lightest value and black being the darkest value. The colors in between also have value, for example yellow has a lighter value than the darker purple. 

You can use value to establish contrast. Value can help establish the mood of the design you’re working on. If you wanted a gloomy look you would use mostly blacks and if you wanted something to look bright you would use lighter notes.

We see this played out even outside of Graphic Design. For example the costume design in Star Wars, with Darth Vadar being in blacks and Luke Skywalker in white. The use of lighter and darker values help establish who the villain is as soon as you see him on screen.

How to use the Elements in Graphic Design

Now you understand the elements, it’s time to figure out how to bring them to life and use them within your work. These elements work in tandem together and you should focus on putting these skills into your visuals.

Pattern

Patterns can play a big role in your visual work.The human brain is amazing at recognizing patterns.Using repetition in your work allows you to light up the pattern recognition part of the brain and give your work an element of consistency.

Patterns are repeated elements of your design. These repeated elements could be using colors, type and sizes to give something a purposeful look.

Contrast

Contrast is the use of balancing opposing elements to create harmony. It’s created by pairing two opposing elements together, like having dark vs light as an example. It’s crucial in Graphic Design and across the 12 Principles of Design to establish a juxtaposition that is interesting and maybe deliberately confusing to the viewer.

You can use different elements to establish contrast, like color, texture, type and other graphic elements.

Emphasis

Making one element of your design work gives it emphasis. This drives the viewers attention to one focal point.

You can use emphasis to bring certain graphic elements to the forefront. By balancing this between the other graphic elements listed, you can draw attention to parts of your design that require it.

For example, if you are designing a poster for a music venue, you want to bring emphasis to the band that’s playing and the key information.

Balance

Balance is using symmetry to create harmony in your designs. Humans love symmetry, it is something that we psychologically enjoy looking at. Using symmetry, both sides of the page of your design would have equal weight shape and lines.

You can use asymmetry too. While we love symmetry, you can use asymmetrical visuals in your design too. Having things deliberately off balance helps draw focus towards one single element of your design.

Proportion

Proportion is the size of the individual elements of your design. It can be used to help us make sense of the images we’re looking at and establish hierarchy. If you were drawing a person next to a building, the building would be much bigger than the person. This helps establish the sizes and gives viewers an understanding of what they’re looking at.

You can also use Proportion to show what the most important elements of your visuals are. They don’t necessarily need to be accurate, but demonstrate that one thing is more important than the other. You see this a lot in movie posters, where the characters are scaled up by importance.

In the Star Wars posters you can see that Darth Vadar is massive compared to the other characters to help demonstrate to the viewer that he is imposing and a large threat. But his head is massive compared to the sizes of the other characters in the poster.

Rhythm / Movement

Rhythm and Movement is the use of repeated patterns, textures and colors to create a feeling of flow. You can use that flow to draw the user’s eye to the areas you want them to look.

For design you can use Rhythm and movement in your work along with the other elements listed to create a design with movement on the page. Use that movement to establish how you want the viewer to feel.

Coming from the Art world you can understand flow in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The use of texture helps establish flow and makes your eye dance around the page leading you to different visual elements one by one.

Composition

Composition is one of the most important visual elements in improving your visual aesthetics. It’s something that has been utilized for centuries from classic artists and has been adopted by Graphic Designers and Photographers. 

Composition is the way things are aligned visually to control the viewer’s eye. It’s easy to utilize in your work, but composition has a lot going on under the hood. There’s actually a lot of mathematics and geometry that makes up composition. 

The Golden Ratio is the gold standard of composition. It helps designers understand the placement of their visuals. But there are many different ways to utilize composition that we’ll go into in a later post.

Harmony

Harmony is about balancing all the elements together to create a sense of unity. However you harness these elements in your work, you’ll need to make sure that they all come together cohesively. Understanding this will bring harmony to your work.

Harmony is about taking a step back from your work, looking at it, and figuring out “Does this make sense?” Do all the elements work together? Is your eye naturally drawn where it shouldn’t be?

Harmony is the unity between all the elements and understanding this skill will give you the training to know whether your design is working for its intended purpose in a visually appealing way.

Conclusion 

At Nollie we believe that inter-disciplinary skills are vital for designers. Understanding the principles of Graphic Design gives you a larger understanding of Aesthetics which will play a huge role in your design work. 

Learning the elements that make up visually appealing work will be beneficial throughout your career. Understanding how to make something look good is a skill that every designer will find beneficial. 

These visual elements will come into play as we progress through the 12 principles of Generalist Design. Understanding Aesthetics is one part of the bigger picture to becoming an unstoppable designer who can apply their creativity to other creative projects.

Once you’ve understood Graphic Design why not bring your artwork to life by adding Animation?