Designing for Clarity:
Graphic Design Tips for Non-Graphic Designers
Additional Resources
During my presentation I referenced a number of resources that you can use to learn more about graphic design basics. To make your life easier, I've collected them all here.
The Actual Slide Deck
Getting Started
Typeface
- I Shot the Serif is a game available as an iOS app and an online game. It challenges you to look at a screen full of different letters in different typefaces, and then “shoot” only the letters in a serif typeface. It’s great for wrapping your brain around the difference between serif and sans serif.
- TypeConnection is a dating game for matching typefaces together successfully. The site allows you to pick a typeface, learn a bit more about its “personality”, and then set it up with another typeface that’s compatible with it. The games gives you a lot of guided feedback, so it’s perfect for learning more about why certain typefaces work, or don’t work, with each other.
- Type Matters! by Jim Williams is one of my favourite books for not only explaining aspects of typography, but showing it as well through beautiful examples. Here are links to it in the US, Canada, and UK Amazon stores.
- KERNME is an amusing web-based letter spacing game. It's an interesting way to explore the precise work that graphic designers do with spacing individual characters so they look balanced.
- What's the deal with all the hate for Comic Sans? Check out this YouTube video by Vsauce to get a quick explanation.
- Take a look at this amusing but informative infographic on a key typeface decision: should I use serif or sans serif?
Graphics
- The book Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds is actually about presentations, but it has some fantastic insight into simplifying your graphics that can honestly be applied to any design project. Here are links to it in the US, Canada, and UK Amazon stores.
- Stock photo sites relatively cheap ways to purchase the rights to professionally created images. I commonly use iStockphoto and Veer.
- The Advanced Search option on Flickr allows you to search specifically for Creative Commons-licensed images.
- It's worth checking out the free design assets available at the E-Learning Heroes website.
- Here's a very basic tutorial video on using PowerPoint to create a simple graphic.
- Once you get comfortable with the basics, try this just slightly more complex tutorial on using PowerPoint to draw a folder.
- Finally, here's a more advanced tutorial on how to use PowerPoint to draw a tv graphic.
Layout
- If you're wondering just how many different ways you can arrange a 3x4 grid, be sure to check out The 892 unique ways to partition a 3 x 4 grid PDF. It literally shows every possible variant of partitioning this type of grid, which is incredibly helpful for when you’re stumped at how you want to layout a page or screen.
Extras
- I'm currently curating a Pinterest board of cheap/free design assets.
- Like the social media icons I used at the end of my presentation? They're available for free here.
- If you ever need to fill a design idea with text, but don't have the actual copy written, you can always use Lorem Ipsum text as a temporary filler. Lorem Ipsum is gibberish that sort of looks like Latin and it can used to block out where you’ll eventually put your real text. It gives you a sense of how a layout with text will look, but it’s all nonsense words. One of the best resources for this filler text is this free Lorem Ipsum generator.
- Want to know more about what exactly Creative Commons licensing is? Here's an explanation in comic form.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
