Do you want to become a graphic designer? In my early childhood days, I find designs company designs, advertisements, and movie billboards awesome. It somehow raises a kind of passion in me that looking at them drives me to create something similar or better than that.  I guess this passion is similar to the art collector who finds happiness in what he collects even if it is a Samurai Sword from whatever era it was.

So if you are like me and you want to become a graphic designer too, perhaps the first step is to define what is Graphic Design? Graphic Design in simple words is a combination of text and images to use in ads, magazines, posters, book covers, and even websites.

The Principles of Design

The principles of design are composed of elements; contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. All of these are connected and you can see it in practically all the designs you see here and there. Watch the video below for more detailed explanation.

Contrast. This element is present when two objects are placed together and have contrasting ideas. Black and white, good and bad, dim and bright. The more different the objects are the more contrast there is, the better. You can see contrast in background and text. When the background is bright, your text is dark and vise versa. This way, the viewer is able to immediately see the message in the text.

Repetition. This principle simply states to repeat or do it again. You will find repetition in many ads and promotional materials. Repetition somehow makes the whole project connected from start to finish, from page 1 to last page. You can see repetition on fonts, bullets, colors, and even alignments.

Alignment. This is the principle of aligning text and images on a page. Alignment is important to create order, organize some essential things on the page, and of course to group similar content. Alignment also create connections. You can align text or images to the left, to the right, or to the center. And you can also use justify where both sides of the text are reaching the left and right.

Proximity. The principle of Proximity is actually the closeness of one element to the other. This element also makes connection between an element or group of elements.  Proximity is usually used to organize ideas.