The Elements Of Graphic Design Book

[Sanna Pospicil]

It turns out professional graphic designers have a few tricks up their sleeves to make their work look, well, professional. Even with all the amazing free tools available for wannabe graphic designers these days, amateurs usually don't have the foundational know-how necessary to create consistently polished-looking designs.

To help you out, we've put together a list of seven basic graphic design elements. It's not a graphic design degree by any means, but having a foundational understanding of these seven basic elements can boost your content creation skills and improve your ability to communicate your design preferences if you ever decide to hire a professional.

We deep-dive into the seven elements below, covering what they are, why you should care, and how to use them to create more professional looking designs -- even if you're operating on a zero-dollar budget.

Sir Isaac Newton is widely credited with creating the very first color wheel back in 1706. As the story goes, Newton took the spectrum of colors produced when light passes through a prism (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) and arranged them in a segmented circle. When the circle was spun rapidly on a rotating disk, the colors blurred together, appearing completely white to the human eye.

Newton's visual categorization system for color was adopted and expanded upon by scientists, artists, and philosophers over the years, eventually resulting in the modern color wheel we all know today.

The modern color wheel consists of three primary colors -- red, yellow, and blue -- which can theoretically be mixed in varying ratios to produce secondary and intermediate colors. Although modern research tells us that color theory is actually a little more complicated than that, the color wheel is still a valuable tool for graphic designers looking for aesthetically pleasing color combinations.

When selecting hues for a project, consider colors that appear directly opposite or beside each other on the color wheel -- these tend to produce the most consistently pleasing combinations. You could also consider using a free online color scheming tool, like ColorSchemer, to do the work for you.

Rikard Rodin, a graphic designer and blogger with over 15 years of design experience, explains that lines can form the underlying architecture of your project. Defining the line of movement in your composition before you get started can help you construct a design that achieves the desired mood.

"You can use mood lines in virtually every element of your design," Rodin writes on his blog. "Or you can contrast different mood lines in different parts of your design to create a more layered design. Take, for example, the 'STABLE' mood line. You can use this in creating your layout. You can use it in your photography. And you can use it in your font selection."

Mood lines don't have to be visible in your final composition -- they can simply act as a guide to provide structure and direction as you work. Of course, line can also be visibly incorporated into your final design as well.

Designer Alexander Koltsov and the folks at Shuka Design created this stunning visual identity for the 2016 World Chess Championship in New York. The team used purposeful but asymmetrical swirls of overlapping lines to represent "the thought process of a chess player."

The scale of different elements in a design will have a big impact on how your audience views and makes sense of your composition. Playing with the relative size of different components in your design allows you to set a focal point, highlight areas of importance, and ultimately guide viewers' eyes through the piece.

Scale isn't quite the same thing as size (though many people tend to incorrectly use them interchangeably when discussing design, i.e., "Make the logo bigger!"). Size refers to an absolute measurement (e.g., the sheet of paper 8'' by 11'') while scale refers to the direct relationship between elements in a design (e.g., the circle is twice as big as the square).

You can use scale to create a visual hierarchy for your design. When an element is displayed at a relatively larger scale than the other elements in a composition, our eyes are naturally drawn to it.

To create a sense of drama and importance, New York-based graphic designer Aurelio Snchez Escudero uses a high-contrast scale between elements in these promotional materials for San Francisco's Social Innovation Week.

Shapes: they're not just for preschoolers! A shape can be loosely explained as anything defined by boundaries. There are two categories of shapes to consider:

Geometric shapes, which are defined by perfect, uniform proportions (such as a circle, square, triangle), and organic shapes, which have less well-defined edges, free-flowing proportions, and essentially no rules (such as wiggly, blob-like things that don't fit into any real category).

Alignment most frequently comes up in design discussions about text and typography, but it's equally important to consider the alignment of non-text elements when building a balanced, orderly composition.

The example above illustrates uniform edge and center alignment -- but that doesn't mean all the elements in your composition always have to follow a single pattern of alignment. In the image below, you can see the elements are aligned by their edges, but not united by a single axis.

Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers designed this minimal book cover for Chasing the Sky, a book that honors the careers of influential female architects. The title typography is aligned around a geometric shape.

Without contrast, our designs aren't just lackluster and boring to look at, they're also difficult to understand. A lack of contrast is often what separates mediocre design work from designs that look professional, polished, and clear.

Take the images below for example -- in the picture on the left, there isn't adequate contrast between the background photo of the man working at a desk and the white text. It's not so easy on the eyes, and the message is difficult to comprehend. In the image on the right, the background has been darkened to create more contrast, making the text way easier to read.

Space is exactly what it sounds like: the empty areas between elements in your design. When it comes to creating professional-looking designs on your own, sometimes what you don't include is just as important as what you do.

When working on a design, consider not only the elements you're including (such as images and text) but how they're arranged and grouped in the composition. It can be tempting to fill every inch of your digital canvas with something, but try to give your elements some room to breathe.

In the example below, you can see how changing the space and grouping of the elements creates a completely different feeling in the composition. On the left, the uniform space between the elements creates a sense of order and security. On the right, the varying spaces between the elements convey a sense of disorder and confusion.

Elements is a certified woman-owned business that provides award-winning creative services for all graphic design and marketing needs including logos + branding, brand review + analysis, consumer marketing, trade show + event graphics (including trade show booth design, event materials, branded apparel and promotional items), digital marketing, package design / POP, print collateral (including business cards, letterheads, brochures, reports, magazines, print advertising and copywriting), public relations (including press releases), social media marketing, strategy + positioning, websites (including website design, website development, ongoing maintenance and SEO) and video / photography art direction.

The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type is in its 3rd Edition, published in 2022. The 1st and 2nd Editions have sold 85,000 copies and the book has become a standard text in graphic design programs across the US and in a dozen foreign countries.

Educator, author, and 35-year design veteran Alex W. White has assembled a wealth of information and examples in his exploration of what makes visual design both stunning and powerfully attractive to readers.

In this comprehensive guide, we're taking it back to the basics. If you're a self-taught designer, or have been out of school for a little while, it's well worth taking the time to brush up on your design knowledge so you can master the tools and techniques that'll take your work to the next level. A great place to start is with a review of the fundamental visual design elements and principles that make good design.

The most basic visual design element is the line. In graphic design, a line is defined as a connection between two strokes. Lines are the building blocks of other visual design elements like shapes. They can also stand on their own to create emphasis or divide elements.

Although basic, lines can have a personality all of their own. Straight, wavy, curved, and zigzag lines each have a distinct look and feel to them. In addition, lines are smooth or textured, dotted or continuous, thick or thin, curved or straight. All in all, there are many creative ways to use lines to create an effective design.

Shapes are another basic visual design element that typically form the core of any design piece. Shapes are two-dimensional, self-contained areas. We typically think of shapes as geometric circles and rectangles, but they come in all forms imaginable.

In graphic design, there are three types of shapes: mechanical, organic, and abstract. Mechanical shapes are typically geometrical with precise edges and corners. They're used to add structure and stability to a design. Organic shapes in design are shapes that mirror the natural world. They may have texture or rounded edges to create a natural look and feel. Abstract shapes are irregular shapes that can be used to add symbolism or variety to design.

Color is a fundamental visual design element that needs little explanation. That said, there's a science to using color effectively in design. Color theory and color psychology provide a strategic foundation for choosing colors that create a specific mood and tone in a design.

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