Devious Design

When you start a design project, your most necessary thing is a concept, an idea – inspiration. As long as you have a solid concept, you have a really good chance that your final product will be successful.

I’ll explain with some background:

Many times you hear people suggest starting an assigned project really early to get ahead. That has never worked for me. Not once.*  Any time I attempt to get a head start on a design project, I fail miserably because I get attached to my first attempt, which undoubtedly won’t work once all the necessary content – stories, photos, graphics, etc. – come in. And if you have a big client, you will probably have an excess of additional content and requests for changes arriving later – or much later – than you’d like. (Usually, the fatal flaw in my first attempt is that I try to work with what I have rather than what I may or may not eventually receive. It’s just as frustrating to have to redesign something because you never received enough content.)

It is extremely stressful to have to go back and make significant layout changes late in the game. This is where your concept development comes into play. If you have a simple, flexible, developed concept, on-deadline work will be much easier to build – and hopefully your final product will be more cohesive and visually stunning.

An example of simple concept development:

Goal: 2-page newspaper spread on campus safety
Initial visual inspiration: Caution tape and the little criminal dude on neighborhood watch signs
Colors that go with that imagery: Yellow and black
What else is yellow/black/criminal? The Watchmen comics

BAM – now you know the look to persue. From there you develop further.

What kind of fonts would fit with that theme?
Well, it should look gothic, like a metropolitan city at night – skyscrapers, streets, taxis. Maybe think comic books ­– Batman, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Sin City. So, let’s try Franklin Gothic or some other sans-serif font, preferably with both a condensed and a extra bold version, like Univers.

How are you going to get it to look as dark as you think it should?
Reverse the type.

What if we don’t have photos or illustrations?
Resurrect the little neighborhood watch dude! And make him big so he becomes a design element rather than a goofy decoration. (It’s fun to experiement with scale.)

Now what do you do?
Open your InDesign document. You already know it’s going to have a black background, yellow text and an ultra-condensed gothic-style font. Having these basics figured out gives you all the flexibility you need to quickly create a cohesive design. Now all you have to do is tedious work – waiting for your content, placing it, lining things up and tweaking it until everything fits comfortably – but the cool, conceptual part was done before you even started.

And here it is:

All you needed was some inspiration.

* Let me clarify: Working ahead has never worked for a layout in a design project that I was developing for other people and waiting for content. It generally works brilliantly for other endeavors.