Introduction
One of the classes I am taking this fall semester at BYUI is Visual Media (COMM 130). This week’s reading of The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Edition 4 included chapters 6 and 7. It was very interesting to learn more about colors and how to best use them for design work. For our assignment this week, we are asked to use the tools found in chapters 1-7 of the book to critique a current design. Something referred to as Design & Reverse Engineer.
Original Design
I chose this beautiful book cover for The Complete Book of the Home, written by Kathleen Hackett Antonson. It was published in 2011 by Weldon Owen for the Home Decor giant Pottery Barn and is available in most bookstores.
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The cover art is a beautifully staged and well-lit photograph of a living room in neutral tones with pops of fall colors of various shades of deep reds, browns, orange, and green. The cover art has an overlay of text at the top and at the bottom of the page.
Analysis
Design Element: Contrast
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If we’re looking at the picture, our eyes will immediately notice the bright contrast in the colors of the text. On the mainly white backdrop, we see a shade of bright red, most likely color-matched using the eye dropper tool in Photoshop to one from the decor pieces in the living room. In contrast to the bright red, we can also find a soft shade of grey to contrast the red. The font color of the bottom text is a shade of white to contrast the background colors of the living room decor. Additionally, the font chosen for the main text appears to be in a strong constrast and very different from the traditional font for the Pottery Barn logo.
Design Element: Repetition
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Whenit comes to repetition, design elements don’t necessarily have to be always completely the same throughout the design. There can be slight variation. For example, the font repeats itself for the main text at the top and then again for the text used at the bottom of the page. However, they are not all the same color. The color red used for HOME is repeated in 2 of the words on the left next to it. The other two words, while different in font, repeat the color for the Pottery Barn logo at the very top. Especially for one-page pieces such as this, using repetition is very useful. If using repetition in multi-page design, you’d refer to is as consistency.
Design Element: Alignment
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Picking a satrong alignment for your text in your design is crucial. For this particular example, we can see several different alignments. All text sections are actually centered on the page. However, the second block, right underneath the logo, is a slight variation within itself. The words “The complete book of the” is right aligned to the word “Home”.
Design Element: Proximity
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When you have more than one text element, you want to make sure that you group together elements that belong together. You want their proximity to be either close or farther apart. For this design sample, we have 3 different text elements: the logo, the title, and a short tagline of what to expect in the book. The deaiger did a good job keeping the logo and title close in prxomity and spacing the tagling to the opposite end of the page. By doig this, they are grouping together the important elements while not distracting too much from the beautiful background photograph of the living room itself. After all, the book is all about design and providing inspiration for the reader, primarily through visual imagery.
Design Element: Color
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As mentioned above, the font color was selected from different elements of the decor using an eye dropper tool within Photposhop. Selecting colors from the actual photograph ensures that the colors will match and not clash. It was also very smart using this shade for red for the words “complete book” and “Home”. Shades of red give the visual appearance to pop out at you, while cool tones, such as the grey used for the other words at the top, recede into the backgruond in comparison.
Conclusion
Many design elements have been familiar to me prior to reading the above mentioned book. However, it was incredibly insightful to learn more in-depth on the why and how about design work. Being able to take apart the individual pieces of this particular design, while simple in nature, was still challenging to ensure I can pin-point every element and step used. In my opinion, the designer of this particular book design did a wonderful job adhering to good design practices and the tools talked about in the book. I look forward to reading and learning more, as well as improving my own design skills.
