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Design Tips: Alignment

So alignment in canberra is very important, just like it is anywhere else in the design will alignment is the special relationship between objects at where they are are similar. So let's say the special relationship between these guys here, so hopes it's too close there we go, so centered left line, right? Aline lined the top anywhere that you can make those kind of micro decisions and a line things and do it quickly, the more more professional your design is going to look on, it may not be something that everyone notices. You may look at something and just think, oh, that looks great, but I'm not quite sure why part of it is because the designer over the person creating it took the time to make this micro decision tow a line, things to make sure that it looks center or left a lander, right? Align again, it's a looking at the relationships between objects so here I'm just moving that leaf a couple pixels, I'll go go back like this doesn't look as clean as that, because it's just not ce...

ntered there, there wasn't care in the placement of the object, it just looks like it was kind of thrown on their canvas can help you align your objects, because as we remember if I click on this and drag see all those little hints that it's giving me so it's telling its even even drawing a hint all the way to the to the word design over there everything on the stage it's saying ok, matt, you want to align something? What do you want to align teo and sort of jump to it so I can pick what I wanted to like to so here I don't care about the the alignment, anything over over there, but I do want it to align to the center of this orange box, so here you can see I have a nice magenta line there, and I just want check to make sure that this that the word autumn is nice a line see how it's lining up nicely, those kind of things they're so quick and easy to do once you get good at it once you get could've figuring out ok, this alliance with this is over here and you can start making those micro decisions very fast and it just enhances your design. You should see some of my designers, though they'll be clicking and moving and stuff and half the time you're like, you don't even know why they're doing some of the alignment and we caught pixel pushing, but when you see the final design all of that time and then energy into making those micro designs comes through and it feels more professional here's another good one vertical alignment of type if we look at this thiss configuration here it just looks kind of thrown in there there's no decisions made about where things line up so if I were to look at this the first thing I do that makes my eyes twitch is the fact that the plane is not in the centre of the page it's just a little bit off so we're going to go and just put it right there and then the fact that escape is down here now we learned in typography that spatial arrangement of the word escape means that there's going to be a mental pause when you're reading this through so it's his european holiday escape we don't like that I like it to be a phrase so in order to get the mind to think of it as a phrase we're going to uh and you know what? I'll nudge this to where I wanted to be so that all three of these lines have equal space between them again it za quick micro decision that pays off in long because make sure apiece feel more professional is their way to select a bunch of items and have it automatically adjust them to us in equal distance that that is a great question so as a designer working with tools like photoshopping illustrator those uh those tools are are there they're so helpful it's called distribution so you can select something two things or three things, and you can have them evenly distribute or online teo to themselves that features not in canada that I know of, but I'm sure it's something that they would consider putting in but that's a good question. Okay, so there's vertical lineman, there's, horizontal line when I look at something like this, it feels like a scrapbook and feels like things weren't placed with a lot of care. So again, we're going to make some micro decisions. First thing we're going to dio is just line these guys up. I moved one down and moved one up, and I want you guys to see a little bit closer, see how far it took me down. So see those all those magenta lines I'd have to choose which ones? I want to light up tio sometimes it can be a little bit difficult. The more you can see, the more you're going. Teo I know what you're what it's asking you you want to line up with. So here I have three magenta lines and it's telling me that you're gonna line this image up pretty much exactly with the image all the way on the left now only have you hit the top in the bottom, but you got this century as well. This thing is the exact same size as this image over here and this one's doing the same thing too so it's just a little reminders of how to move things around it's second nature for designers when they get those hints to be like oh yeah, I'm sorry I didn't want to align that whereas people who aren't used to this they have to take a second think they have to be like ways like why is that? Do I want to do that or do I not want to do that? Chances are you're going to want to do with its success that you d'oh um so uh left alive, right aligned another great micro decision that's really easy to make there is no hard and fast rule about which one the right doesn't really matter but should probably be aligned in some sense, so I'm just moving it right over their summer essentials and we talked about this a little bit earlier uh when you have text that is close to the edge of something in the brain, it uh feels uncomfortable there's something about it about having space around text that makes it feel like it's at home on the on the canvas so when I see designs and I and designed and designer has done this and it wasn't intentional because sometimes you can do this intentionally, it immediately tells me the person didn't put a lot of time into the placement of the text so what I can do is ah select both of these actually this is a good point tio to show you how to do that in order to select more than one object you can do it in two ways you can shift click so I click on one thing hold downshift uh oh I get it and click on that so that you can see both are highlighted or you can click and drag and you notice that when I hit either object it's ah it's selecting that object now it also select the background to un select something you've already selected in your selection group here you could also shift click on it uh that's a quick designer trick so if I wanted to get to just these two words I would drag and select everything and then diesel ect the background so I just have the things that I want to manipulate and then I can get away from the edge man, I feel so much better about this now alright good little bit of space goes a long way considering placement of texan objects um great so that was alignment and then I think one of the last things that I want to talk about with you guys is the concept of simplicity and for this I think we'll go teo my presentation really quick because this is sort of a word of warning and it's it's designed one o one but it's, an incredibly hard skilled to master let's, say, for the sake of argument, we have two things to consider in our design. We've placed one image on the stage. Now I have I have I'm counting the stage or the space as a thing, because it's, probably one of the first things that you need to consider in your design, my happy white square that actually counts is your first graphic element. The space that you're designing in is the very first thing to consider at all times, because it has a size, it has a orientation to it, and oftentimes color in the background change so your space and one image this requires thiss line which I call a consideration, right? So we're making one consideration. How does this image look in this space and that's it that's? The only thing you have to worry about? What if you had another element? What if you had a piece of text? So now we have one image in the space, and we have to consider a piece of text, not just how the text looks on the space, but how does that text look with the image? Can I read the text now that it's on the does the color of the text go well with the color of the image? So we by adding one element, we've created two new consideration ins that we need to take it into account where if I had another piece of text, what if I now have a headline and a subhead you sort of see where I'm going with this it creates three more considerations so as a designer now I have to look at twice a cz much or way more considerations that I did just having one element the mohr elements that you add the mork considerations that you have to make the answer to too avoiding this kind of situation where you have to make all these micro decisions that as non designers you're just not used to making and you shouldn't have to make is to simplify it's to it's to go back to something where you don't have to consider all of the all of the things going on, which means that you have a higher chance of a successful impactful design. This is something that is prevalent in social media posts and pinterest where they tell you just be simple just go simple one piece of text one image my my my uncle who who is an advertising he once told me he said, if you have an ad and you're saying more than one thing you're saying things you're saying too many things uh if your message in your graphic or in your design if you have more than one purpose to it it's one purpose to many eso simplicity isn't about making things harder to understand because you have less it's about having less considerations as designers I love middle is because it means I don't have the work is hard I can just take my time and consider this one piece of text at this one image and look at all the relationships between those two things and it's not clouded by lots of other elements so when I see designs that have a banner and a graph and image and it's all on the page and it's well laid out that's really professional design because someone has taken the time to look at every single one of these dark lines and figure out how this interacts with that interacts with that. So going back to cannes va when we look at uh some of these designs that they're giving us some of the layouts we see this principle in the things that they're there asking us to do with the designs so for instance, back here when I just pick this one lay out a couple lines a background image to pieces of type now that's a lot to consider and they have and they've already done that work for you all we need to do is change it nor to match our brand or to make it say, the message that we want to say and that's it we can change elements of the design, but then we take a risk of having to reconsider all of the things that the decision that have already been made for us. I'll give you an example, let's say let's say I don't like these lines here, and I want to move them somewhere great. I'll move them down here. But now that I've done that, I have to consider the visibility of the lines. Why are they down there? What color should they be now that they're separated from this set? There was symmetry in this design where these lines mirrored the lines of the top. Now, there's, no symmetry. What do I do with that? Do I move these lines up now? All of these things are maddening to someone who's not used to making all of those considerations. But if we want to avoid that, we can use the layoffs that are given to us and respect the fact that some of those most of those considerations have been made and we could start practicing making those little small micro design decisions on our own.