Do you often encounter such situations:

• Send the finished design to Party A, and then he tells you that it is too messy and should be unified.
• So you made a hard adjustment. When you sent it to him again, he said that it was peaceful, and there should be a contrast.
• You think, is it playing with me? It will be unified and compared later, which is contradictory?

You are serious about playing, but in fact you can avoid being played by him, as long as you can balance the relationship between the two.

Alignment and variation

Alignment is one of the most basic principles of layout design. The commonly used ones are left alignment, right alignment, top alignment, bottom alignment, center alignment, and both ends alignment. The purpose is to make the layout cleaner and easier to read. For example, in the following works, words and words, words and pictures, and pictures and pictures are in their own places.

Let's take an example. Suppose you want to design a mobile phone banner map to promote the photo function of a mobile phone. The copy is as follows:

This kind of picture is not difficult to make. You can directly use a mobile phone and several photographic works as the main vision of the picture.

After the pictures are found, you fill one picture into the phone, and the other pictures are scattered around. Then you put the whole visual subject in the center of the page, and the text is arranged on both sides according to the primary and secondary order. The general effect is as follows:

When you are staring at the picture and wondering what else to add, Party A appears behind you. He stares at your computer expressionless, slowly spits out a few words: "Too messy, good LOW", and then disappears. You are very smart, and immediately understand that Dad wants to arrange himself more neatly and orderly.

Then adjust the chaotic feeling of free typesetting~

▲ The text on the left is aligned with the picture on the right, the title is aligned with both ends of the text, and the icon is aligned with the text on the left.

The alignment principle is "perfectly" implemented. The whole layout is much cleaner and tidy, and the visual process is simpler. It's OK now, you think, but it's not as simple as you think. Because I don't know when Party A appears behind you again. He has a shriveled mouth and a look of disgust, saying, "It's too stiff. How about a little change?"

Change, do you want to change back to the previous state? NO~NO~NO, as long as you make some changes on the existing basis, you should not only align but also be flexible and changeable.

It sounds a bit confusing, but this is the difficulty and subtlety of typesetting. Take a look at these works:

Now you know, the reason why the above scheme is rigid is that the text and pictures are aligned too neatly, so one of the sections needs to be changed. Since the text is arranged horizontally, can the pictures be placed obliquely to form a certain contrast?

▲ Tilt the picture, stagger the LOGO and the text to the upper left corner, and the line at the bottom extends beyond the layout.

Well, let's go back and see if it conforms to the principle of "making some changes in alignment and finding alignment relationships in changes".

It can be seen from the above figure that although the image is tilted, it is deformed and distorted on the basis of alignment; Although not all elements in the layout are aligned to a certain line, no element is isolated, and each element is aligned with other elements in the layout; More importantly, the visual center of gravity of the left text section and the right picture section are also horizontally aligned, so the whole picture can be balanced.

Unification and comparison

Although there are only three elements of design: words, pictures and colors, each element has countless forms of expression, such as different fonts, font sizes, color values, textures, styles, pictures, directions, etc. If there are too many different things in a layout, it will appear very messy, which makes people bored. Therefore, it is necessary to unify these "differences", The effect of comfort and coordination has been achieved.

Taking a rotating picture of a sports brand as an example, the text is as follows:

This kind of design is most effective when athletes are the main body, so we need to find a person who is running:

The most important thing for sports brands is to design a sense of movement and fashion, so I divided the background into two slanted color blocks, one red and one blue, and then put the characters in the center of the picture, with the text distributed on the left and right sides to create a strong visual impact.

Overall, it is quite consistent with the tone of the sports poster, but it is still a bit messy visually, and many details are not unified. For example, the slanting angle of the characters is different from that of the background color block and title, the font style of the main text is different (NIKE and JUST DO IT are relatively strong, but the ready-made is relatively soft), the style of the elements is not uniform (the button for more information about the rounded corner does not match the overall style), and the color of each element is also lack of contact.

What should we do? Here we need to use the principle of unification. We can try to unify the above mentioned inconsistencies, as shown in the following figure:

▲ In the adjusted scheme II, the fonts are simple and powerful boldface, which are horizontally aligned, the background is changed to a single gradient color, the tilt angle of characters and characters is also unified, the "Learn More" button is changed to a parallelogram, and the colors are reduced to three.

It is true that there is no chaos, but there are also new problems. The picture lacks hierarchy, and the prominent information is not highlighted. At this time, comparison is needed. Arrange the two sides with obvious differences, contradictions and opposites together to increase the visual impact. Common contrasts in design include size contrast, font contrast, color contrast, space contrast, direction contrast, length contrast, thickness contrast, curve and straight contrast, contour contrast, virtual reality contrast, etc.

To deal with the relationship between unity and contrast, we need to remember two key points:

1. The tonality of each element should be unified, and the presentation of elements should be contrasted.
2. To ensure that the contrast relationship in the picture will not destroy the overall coordination.

Following this idea, let's add some contrast relations to the above figure. For example, the title of Scheme II is tilted too far, which is not beautiful, so we simply change it to vertical tilt; In terms of brand size, I choose to highlight the brand name. Narrow the advertising language and strengthen the contrast of size; The previous practice of dividing the background in two has been restored, only adding a little sense of space, and unifying the color of the figure clothes with the background color.

Scheme III is indeed more coordinated than Scheme I, more hierarchical and visual impact than Scheme II, and the overall tone is still young, fashionable and dynamic.

Simple and rich

Simplicity should be the most widely heard design principle, but we are also troubled by the so-called minimalism, which is often said to be too monotonous and not rich enough. And those designs that feel rich in themselves are said to be messy. Why is this so? Let's have a correct understanding~

Simplicity does not mean that the design should use the least elements without any modification, but that the design theme should be simple, the visual process should be clear, the vision should be focused, and the priorities should be clear.

▲ Although there are many elements and colors in the above figure, the overall feeling is simple.

And richness does not mean that there must be many elements or stacked effects in the picture, but that there must be details, layers and quality.

▲ Although the design in the above figure is simple on the whole, it does not appear monotonous.

Another example: the cover design of an agricultural product brochure. The necessary elements of the cover are very simple. There is only one logo and one sentence. Therefore, it is easy for us to think of minimalism. With a white background, a logo and a line of text, together with a special paper and some craftsmanship, you can look very tall. Many big brands do the same.

This is indeed a passable solution, but the expression method is too simple, which can neither reflect the designer's skills nor express the brand's tonality and characteristics, lacking in attractiveness, so we need to do addition to make it more rich.

How to enrich it? The most direct way is to introduce pictures and color blocks. Since the category is agricultural products, and the copy focuses on health and safety, we can find a green and ecological picture.

In order to keep consistent with the narrow and long layout, I also cut the picture into a vertical rectangle and combined it with a green block of the same size to form the main vision of the layout. The logo is placed on the left side of the picture, as shown below:

This is a bit of a design, and it also adds category attributes, but it lacks details and is not eye-catching, so something needs to be added. Of course, the newly added elements can only be used as auxiliary, not too eye-catching, so I quickly thought of leaf veins, which can be associated with leaf elements and suitable for shading.

If you put the leaf vein at the bottom of the layer, you will encounter three situations. One is to completely tile the leaf vein, but the whole page will not be left blank, which will appear depressed; The second is to show the whole leaf, but this treatment will be very stingy; So I only use the leaf vein to cover about half of the page, which echoes the picture.

The pictures have been improved, but there are still a few small decorative elements missing in the picture, so I added the English of the copy and the brand name.

After addition, the whole picture is enriched and the layers are opened, giving the impression that it is neither messy nor repressive, because each element has a clear primary and secondary order, which is connected without interference. However, addition should also be done with confidence. For example, the following figure is a little over stacked, which looks very complicated and not refined.

To handle the relationship between simplicity and richness, two points should be noted:

1. Ensure that the main body is single and exquisite enough;
2. To ensure that there are simple decorative elements that complement the main body.

Norms and Breaks

Norm and break are a pair of contradictory principles in format design. Norm is to make the picture more organized and orderly and look like a whole.

▲ The main elements of the above figure are normalized in a rectangle, and then each small rectangle is combined into a large rectangle.

The opposite of the norm is breaking, which means breaking the norm, breaking the shackles, breaking the calm, and making the picture look more flexible.

▲ Using color blocks or pictures to create a sense of bondage, and then let some elements out of the color blocks, is a classic form of standardization and breaking.

When should we strictly follow the rules? When should we break the rules? In fact, it is better to have both in a complete design, and the key to balance the two is: first standardize and then break, that is, on the basis of good specifications, select some parts to break, or take a brochure of China Mobile cloud services as an example, the copy is as follows:

Obviously, the visual tone of the cover should have a sense of science and technology. It should reflect the keywords of the Internet, information and big data, so I found a picture with a sense of science and technology.

The layout of such albums is usually simple and regular, so I decided to use a grid system to assist in typesetting. Except for the logo, all elements are arranged in the picture, and all text is left aligned according to the grid settings.

▲ The standardized layout looks very rigorous.

However, this has also resulted in the lack of changes in the layout, so we try to do some "breaking" on this basis.

For example, the original LOGO is too close to the picture, which seems very depressing. Here we can separate them more widely; Chinese titles, short lines, and English titles are also too crowded, and can be moved a little bit; The text is not necessarily within the picture range, so I added a blue block to the English title and moved it out of the picture area; The company name at the bottom is also listed below the picture.

▲ The composition of the adjusted scheme has also changed accordingly. The previous composition was up and down, but now it has become diagonal composition.

After breaking the rules, the layout is still clean, but it is more flexible and has a sense of design than before.

To sum up, design is not simple addition and subtraction, nor is it just simple alignment and unification with clear direction. There is no principle that can lead us directly to the end of design, but our goal is clear, that is, to do effective design.