Objectives:
This course is designed to help you uncover hidden skills and to improve your confidence when making design decisions. It is for people who find themselves with design responsibilities but who have had no formal design training
You will cover the five essential building blocks of design, look at working with type and colour and discover how to resolve common design problems
(This is a print design based course - there is a version of this course for web designers)
WHAT IS DESIGN?
Good and bad design
Five questions to ask before you design anything
KEY DESIGN ELEMENTS
A guide to relevance, contrast, proportion, consistency, direction,
totality and restraint
The five building blocks of design
LAYING OUT YOUR PAGE
Using the page organisation tools
Using the text organisation tools
WORKING WITH TONE AND SPACE
Using white space
Rules, borders, boxes and drop shadows
Creating bleeds
THE POWER OF TYPE
Type history and type decisions
Type families
Tips and techniques for presenting type
Special type effects
Widows and orphans
WORKING WITH COLOUR
Different colour models
Choosing colours
Spot colours
Printing colours
INCORPORATING PHOTOGRAPHS
Illustrations or photographs?
Designing with photographs
SHORTCUTS TO GOOD DESIGN
Maintaining a swipe file
AIDA: the four secret ingredients of good design
SOLVING COMMON DESIGN PROBLEMS
Rivers of white space
Inappropriate column spacing
Claustrophobic pages
Whispering headlines
Floating heads and subheads
Too few/too many typefaces
Questions and answers
Castalia, 49 Bisterne Avenue, London, E17 3QR. Tel: 020 8926 1564. Fax: 020 8923 7952
