Week 11: Contrast Exercise (Visual Communication)

Sad to say, one of the challenges that designers face is that people really do judge books by their covers. Which could explain a lot. So for this week's assignment, I'll focus on book covers again, this time looking at their color pallets.

Good Example: Hans Christian Andersen
Right here, we have a decent contrast of colors. The yellow border creates a pleasing contrast that leans towards Leveling, being one of the Primaries that contributes to the green inside. The difference in Tone emphasizes the difference, but the low saturation prevents the contrast from becoming garish. The red bar in the upper half provides a greater contrast, as Red and Green are diametrically opposed hues. This causes the subtitle The Complete Fairytales and Stories to pop out at the viewer while its darker tone mutes the effect enough that the contrast, again, remains acceptable.








Bad Example: A Glossary of Literary Terms

This book, however, is a different story. The initial intention was (apparently) to use the contrast between Yellow and Purple hues to make the text on the cover pop out. Unfortunately, the purple's saturation made the contrast far too great. The dull, less-saturated yellow was likely intended to mute the contrast and cause the letters to pop out; instead the texts' color juxtaposition are almost entirely disappears against the purple. The contrast in tone between the lighter text is also too great, making the sharpness feel almost painful. Even the design in the background, which is almost identical in tone, hue and saturation, still feels jarring.

Contrast aside, the purple color, by any design standards, seems to be a very dangerous one to design with, since there's no way of using it tastefully. Furthermore, the scheme feels gaudy and completely inappropriate for a reference text.

Week 10 Assignment

Option 2: Navigational Examples

I'm currently exploring various fields of design - specifically, graphics design for print media. For my two examples, I've taken two different extremes of direction, from this week's Newsweek and from Issue 40 of Advanced Photoshop, respectively.

The Direct Route: Newsweek
This scan of a Newsweek article displays pretty much the simplest and most straightforward example of magazine print. The series of columns reads from right to left and downward.

Designers face the challenge that many people are put off by large walls of text staring back at them from the page; thus long articles seem intimidating or bothersome. However, columns "break down" the article into multiple chunks - the reader reaches the end of each individual line quite easily, and gains a sense of momentum. The system likewise remains true to the way that most English-speaking readers' eyes move, going from up to down and from left to right. Adding pictures, charts and breaks for notable quotes further adds diversity, regaining the reader's attention which might slip if the text were unvaried, and also draws attention specifically to the most important points the article makes.

The Complex Route: Advanced Photoshop
The readers of magazines that focus on art face an additional problem: adding flavor. Unlike with Newsweek, the readers expect a degree of variety and ingenuity with the text itself while keeping the information still legible and easy to follow. The additional problem of the instructional material here is that sometimes more detail and bigger pictures are needed; uniform picture sizes really aren't feasible.

Advanced Photoshop solved the problem by using several conventions, as you can see on the right. The flow favors left-to-right over up-to-down, a format that is slightly more confusing to readers familiar with the latter. However, keeping this system constant helps avoid extra confusion. Each step is, naturally, numbered in big typefont, preventing the difference between steps from being easily missed. Additionally, the difference in picture size and shapes are made notably less jarring by having them alternate between above the text and below it, allowing for fashionable asymmetry instead of jarring size difference. The system does not always work - this particular project caused me to fumble at least twice, so perhaps the shift to left-to-right organization is a bit more confusing for some than others.