Design for Print Masterclass

Course Overview

This course 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.

Audience

This course is designed to help you uncover hidden skills and to improve your confidence when making design decisions. This is a print design based course - there is also a version of this course for web designers.

Course Outline

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