A back cover and potential pitch for Left Coast

Thoughts?

Left Coast: Interior Art

Got a couple of pictures I've been playing around with in Photoshop tonight.

What I've been up to: Left Coast

(Draft 1)

 

Graphic Design Practice #8

I'm pleased I managed to figure out how to create an opaque background for text, right-clicking and using Fill with some opacity.

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Emptiness, Grids and CRAP)

A slide is composed of positive elements (such as text or logos) and empty (a.k.a. 'negative') space. The idea seems to be that you can use negative space to draw attention to the positive elements.

Having empty space in your slide seems like a simple concept, but it's hard to implement; it's very tempting to fill that empty space with lots of other stuff. From what I can tell, the principle to apply is this:

• Start with nothing, and then add.

To begin with, look for the empty space in your slides. Once you can see it, use it. Reynolds demonstrates the difference between asymmetrical and symmetrical designs here. Asymmetrical designs activate the empty space and make your design more interesting. Symmetrical designs tend to crush the empty space out to the sides.(*)

* That's because symmetrical designs are centred along a strong vertical axis and are mirrored on both sides.
Guiding the Eye

"A well-designed slide has a clear starting point and guides the viewer through the design."

Presentation Zen provides a couple of tips here:

• Make sure images (especially of people's eyes) guide the viewer's eyes towards the elements you want them to look at
• Have a clear hierarchy that shows which elements on your slide are the most important, which are less important, and which are least important.

Reynolds also talks about using grids on your slides, and composing the information on them according to the rule of thirds.



The red dots at the intersections of these lines are called 'power points'. These are areas where you might consider placing the main subject of the slide.

Using grids to divide your page or slide into thirds will also help you align the various elements on them.

CRAP

Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity.

This was another moment where I was reading Presentation Zen and realised that it was referring to a book I already own. In this case The Non Designers Design Book, the first book on layout and typography I ever bought. It's a great read, and it made reading about the principles in this section more like revision for me. To quote directly from PZ:

"Use the principle of contrast to create strong dynamic differences among elements that are different. If it is different, make it very different." Contrasts can create a focal point for your slide, clearly pointing out the one element that is dominant. This gives the viewer a starting point to process information.

"Use the principle of repetition to repeat selected elements throughout your slides. This can help give your slides unity and organisation."

"Use of the principle of alignment to connect elements visually (through invisible lines) on a slide. Grids are very useful for achieving good alignment. This will give your slide a clean and well organised look."

"Use the principle of proximity to ensure that related items are grouped together. People will tend to interpret items together or near each other as belonging to the same group." This reminds me of a basic rule of writing: help a reader understand a sentence by grouping related words and concepts together. As an example, compare the previous sentence to this one:

• Related words and concepts can be used to help a reader if you group them together as this will make them understand a sentence more easily.

Grouping stuff together means an audience doesn't have to think about what you're trying to say. Instead, they can think about what you're saying.

That's it for Section 2 of PZ. Time to take another break -- but over the next week I'll link to a few of the presentations mentioned in chapter 7.

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Remove clutter, use pictures)

Now we're getting into the principles that Garr Reynolds identifies as being useful for the good graphic design of slides.

First up is Signal to Noise ratio -- the ratio of relevant information on a slide compared to its irrelevant information. The goal is to get rid of clutter. If you remove as much irrelevant information as possible, people can understand what the slide is saying as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Some sources of irrelevant information that make it harder to understand a slide include:

• inappropriate charts
• 3-D charts (which often make it more difficult to interpret data)
• ambiguous labels
• distracting grids
• footers
• logos (remove these from all but the first and last slides)

Reynolds recommends using as few elements as possible on a slide. However, you should consider retaining or including elements that support the message at a more emotional level. That's the subject of his next principle.


Picture Superiority Effect

Pictures are remembered better than words, if you or exposed to the picture for longer than 30 seconds.(*) The picture and your words must reinforce (not repeat) each other for this to happen.

* This Picture Superiority Effect is strongest when the picture represents common, concrete things.

Historically, words have dominated presentations because we lack the technology to easily take or acquire pictures. Now we have readily available digital cameras, editing software and Internet resources. Some sources of rights-free images on the Internet include:

Morgue File
Flickr Creative Commons Pool
Image After
Stock.xchng
The everystockphoto search engine

As Reynolds established earlier, bullet-pointed lists of words usually aren't effective in a live talk. They should be used rarely and as a last resort. The three main techniques that come out of this section are:

1. Ask yourself what information are you representing with written words that you could replace with a photo or other graphic?
   
   
2. Find images with plenty of empty space around them (images that are scaled to at least 800x600) and place text inside those images
   
   
3. Quotes or phrases can illustrate your points. Use them sparingly; keep them short and legible. You don't want to bore the audience by reciting what they can (or have) already read.

One thing that I have really appreciated about Presentation Zen is that it constantly draws on documentary and comics as examples of effective presentations to study. In fact, it actually spends quite a bit of time quoting from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I think I have some further reading and watching to do in this area (coming soon: looks at Zenith and An Inconvenient Truth).

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Designing for simplicity)

I'm going back to my summary of Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Presentation Zen (PZ) is about designing presentations that effectively communicate with the audience. Previously I have summarised Reynolds' ideas on creating the story of your presentation; now it's time to look at his ideas on visually designing the presentation.

He begins with the idea of simplicity - which he defines as a clarity that gets to the heart of the matter.

Achieving simplicity takes time, but it also makes the time that the audience spends paying attention to you far more worthwhile, as they will learn more from your presentation. Comparing the idea of 'simplicity' with ' giving the audience every bit of information', Reynolds makes the point that if you overload people with information, what (if anything) will they remember? He advises focusing only on information that illustrates your core point.

Similarly, if you overload a slide with information, pictures, charts, sidebars and borders, you force the audience to search for relevant information.

Simplicity makes it easy for the audience to understand the heart of what you're saying.

How do you achieve simplicity?

Each presentation's design will have its own logic, layout and rules (*). PZ recommends you: (a) design from the start, and (b) use design to organise information in a way that makes things clearer.

* I believe this - based on my experiences with writing scripts, songs and short stories, everything I've created has had its own internal logic. Once I've figured out what that logic is, it's made writing and redrafting far more effective. In fact, I do consider something to be finished until I figured out its logic and helped it live up to that as much as I can.

Clarity in design is achieved by elimination and omission. In other words, good designs have plenty of empty space.

• Aim to get the maximum effect with a minimum of graphic elements
• Use negative space
• Suggest rather than state
• Subtract rather than add

Reynolds then lays out his essential principles of design:

• Signal vs Noise Ratio
• Picture Superiority Effect
• Empty Space
• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

I'll go into more detail about each of these in the next couple of posts.

Graphic Design Practice #7

More Photoshop challenges (where you get a random picture, title and quote, and make a book cover):



That's my second draft. My first draft (where I wanted to play with the title a little) looked like this:

Lost ads

More, here.

Graphic Design Practice #6

A revision of yesterday's cover - I wanted to create more white space, and use some contrast in the font for the quote.

Graphic Design Practice #5

I learned about 'gradient fill' with this one - the nice shading from dark blue to white in the background.

I tried mucking around with a lot of differents appearances and placements for the quote, but in the end I decided that keeping it simple was going to be the best thing for the cover. I did do two versions though - adjusting the colour of the quote so that it sort-of matched the picture.

Graphic Design Practice #4

My most recent design.

Graphic Design Practice #3

This third mock-cover is even simpler, but I tried to turn the quote into a tattoo (mucking around with the question mark to make it a bit more primal):

Graphic Design Practice #2

For my second cover, I went for something a bit simpler, and I wanted to take advantage of the black border on the left hand side:

Graphic Design Practice #1

I've been finding this graphic design challenge thread really inspirational - use a random wikipedia article as a title and randomly select a picture, and then turn them into a cover for a game.

I've never used Photoshop seriously before, and this challenge has been just the excuse I needed to start teaching myself.

Here's my first cover: