“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in. It’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”
Susan Kare, graphic designer
Pop quiz: What color does the human eye react to the fastest?
In this issue:
- Level Up Your Editorial and Magazine Web Design Skills
- The Magic of Surrealism
- Kinetic Typography
Level Up Your Editorial and Magazine Web Design Skills
Editorial designers play a key role in the sharing, presentation, and understanding of information. In particular, this discipline can be essential for bringing some transcendental change to society.
Due to the digital revolution taking over many forms of communication, magazines, books, and newspapers are becoming more challenging to design.
Print remains an important medium for designers, even as they learn to adapt their concepts to various screen sizes. The impact of new technologies, however, is dramatically changing newspaper layouts.
The design of newspaper articles, magazine layouts, and books requires a broad range of skills from diverse designers. Many publication design specialists are finding a place in electronic media in the following areas:
- iPhone applications
- Editorial web and online blogs
- Electronic publications
Content published in magazines and books requires guidelines and rules regarding the layout and typography used for the layout designs and volumes produced.
Users Connect with Words Through Design
Great editorial designers share many of the same skills as other kinds of graphic designers. There are, however, different challenges and common rules within each specific field of editorial layouts.
Here are some tips to help you create outstanding editorial designs:
- Understand and design for your readers
- Make the design work on a variety of levels
- Design the cover first, then the article layout
- Use a grid system
- Find the right typography pattern
- Use white space
- Consider pacing to let the content breathe
- Know which visual element or story is the most important on a page and outline it accordingly
- Ensure your design shines cross-platform
- Be different
👉 View some examples of outstanding editorial design.
Content-Heavy Web Design
The task of designing a beautiful website is never an easy one, but it becomes significantly more challenging when there is a lot of content. Often, magazines, consulting firms, nonprofit website designs, and other similar organizations have a large amount of written content, making it hard to lay out the website intuitively and appeal to the audience.
How can you best design a website that utilizes a lot of written content?
Here are some tips:
- Organize the most relevant content into groups based on knowing users’ search criteria.
- Keep the site straightforward and user-friendly.
- Give visitors easy navigation to find what they’re looking for.
- Make it stand out with a beautiful design.
⚡️ Here are some content-heavy websites with great design.
Go Deeper:
- 10 Tips for Improving Your Editorial and Magazine Web Design Craft
- Web Design Done Well: Excellent Editorial
The Magic of Surrealism
Surrealism has been affecting art lovers for nearly a century. How about you put it into design?
Surrealism occurs when common and unrelated things are juxtaposed in unexpected ways to create something otherworldly and powerful.
Graphic designers can use Surrealism to convey a message by taking multiple disparate images and giving them a relationship that evokes a new way of understanding a subject.
Surrealism in design allows viewers to be transported to magical places, freed from the confines of their own making, or have their heads expanded into space. Brands that utilize Surrealist design allow their customers to fulfill a sense of desire.
How to Incorporate Surrealism into Your Work
Understanding the fundamental elements of Surrealism will help you reach your design goals and find success.
Here are some tips:
- Combine unusual combinations
- Tap into dreams
- Use soft colors
- Make it dark and ethereal
👀 Take a look at Surrealism in graphic design
When to Use Surrealism
Surrealism can be used in a project to explain why a viewer feels the way they do about something or to reinforce or negate that feeling. Another way that Surrealism is useful is as a shortcut to getting a complex message across.
🌝 Discover examples of Surrealism in graphic design and illustration
Go Deeper:
Kinetic Typography in Branding
With the popularity of short-form video content through Instagram and TikTok, brands are making use of kinetic typography to attract consumers.
Moving typography is also making its way into web design, making the web experience more dynamic and immersive.
Why Use Kinetic Typography?
- Excellent for short, to-the-point, and attention-grabbing content
- Great for emphasizing points
- Boosts user experience on websites
- Good entertainment value
Here are some must-see examples of kinetic typography to inspire you!
Go Deeper:
- Kinetic Typography: An Introductory Guide – Design Shack
- Kinetic Typography: 50+ Amazing Video Examples – Wyzowl
- These 5 Reasons Will Make You Go With Kinetic Typography Animation – WebDew
Pop Quiz Answer: Red
The eye reacts fastest to shades of red. The retina contains two types of color receptors: rods and cones. Rods are responsible for night vision and low-light vision. Cones, on the other hand, are responsible for distinguishing colors.
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