Lessons
Why Design Matters
05:50 2Design Vs. Aesthetic
06:27 3Impact Of Design
07:01 4The Design Process: Understand Your Audience
09:17 5The Design Process: Understand Your Content
05:21 6Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
05:47 7Design Principles: Contrast
02:55 8Design Principles: Repetition
03:20Design Principle: Hierarchy & Proximity
05:37 10Principle Scale And Balance
02:48 11Design Principles: Typography
04:29 12Design Principles: White Space
01:11 13Design Principles: Color
06:09 14Design Principles: Graphics, Icons, And Photos
02:51 15Design Principles: Layouts And Focal Points
01:53 16Design Principles: Color-Blind Accessibility In Design
01:41Lesson Info
Design Principles: Typography
So now we wanna look at some of the elements of visual design that can really help us achieve these principles of balance, color, et cetera. So we're gonna move through these pretty quickly, but we've got typography, white space, color, images and icons and layouts. Let's jump right in with typography. So typography, I like to say is like a voice. It's like a personality. It can communicate so much on its own and it can really trigger emotions for people. So fonts have a personality, but the thing is, just because you're computer comes with however many hundred fonts doesn't mean you should use those fonts. And the other day I was scrolling on Twitter and I saw a little either tweet or a meme or something. And a designer had tweeted and said, "By the time you are 35 years old as a designer or something, you should have amassed 300 fonts and only use five of them." And really it's true. You shouldn't be using all these fonts. So just because they're available does not mean you should us...
e them. Fonts have a big impact here. It's more than what font you choose though, it's how you use the fonts. So are how you lay them out. So I wanna give you couple of examples of how you can adjust your font, text, et cetera to make it more readable and scannable. And I know I sound like a broken record in every meeting I have with clients, probably even in this class, but I'm always thinking how do I make this more readable and more scannable? And that means when you're looking at something, easily be able to get the gist of it without reading everything. Because today, most people are not reading every word especially if it's online. So I'm always striving to make things readable and scannable. So rule number one, limelight makes text a lot more readable. Over at the left, it's all the same amount of text, same exact words. But if you compare those two, the one on the left, it's really tight line height. I think that's about a 1.0. If we look over at the right, that is probably a 1.2 or 1.5. Much, much ease to scan and read. Rule number two, make paragraphs into chunks, a nice technical term. I'm always telling people, we need to chunk that out more. Let's chunk it. And we know what that means in my little designer world. And now you know that if you want to make things readable and scannable, you have to chunk it out. So again, same exact text and maybe grammar and creative writing people would disagree with this, because maybe this is all about the same topic. And it's weird to think that you would have a new paragraph just after two sentences, but this is how people are reading. And if we're writing a book, that's a different story, but chances are, you are doing something like an email or a tweet or a Facebook post or something in Keynote. So you want to chunk things out and don't worry that you're breaking up a paragraph because no one's grading this. So rule number three, break your text up with headers to make it more scannable. And what I like to do is make the assumption that you want someone at a minimum, if only they read your headlines, they have an inkling of what you were trying to communicate them. So make sure that you use headlines in order to kind of summarize or set up whatever each of these sections is about. Rule number four, centering text. I don't know why people love center text. It seems cute. I don't know where this came from and it's fine to center text sometimes, but centering a lot of text is not good, because the way that your eye reads, we read left to right, left to right. And there's this perfect line over here. So your eye think of a typewriter, it's this back, forth, back, forth. Over here, there is not that even line on the left 'cause it's centered and it's harder to scan.
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