Taking your design online through Digitization
Justin Lemaire
For people that are truly interested in getting as detailed and perfect a recreation of their hard copy pieces of art as possible, digitization is definitely one option that is on the table for you. Digitization allows you to make a piece by piece recreation of your hard copy so that the digital recreation is extremely accurate. Digitization will result in a vector image online, which makes it particularly advantageous in certain situations.
The two main drawbacks of digitization however are cost and time. Digitization is by no means a cheap process and even a rudimentary digitization apparatus can run you a few hundred dollars. Additionally, most digitization requires that you create a number of points along the things you want digitized, which means that you are going to have to spend a lot of time getting all of the shapes in your hard copy just right. The more detailed you want to get, the more points are required and subsequently the more time you are going to have to take to do it.
While digitization can result in extremely accurate digital representations of drawing, it is a costly and time consuming process to be sure. There are trade-offs in all things and these are the ones you have to make when you digitize hard copy drawings.
Texture and Graphic Design
Justin Lemaire
Moving along the list of graphic design elements brings us to the idea of texture. Texture is an element of graphic design that is a different beast from the line and a shape, although at the same time the different regions that are created within shapes often through the use of line techniques is what ends up creating texture in the first place. People know what texture is because everything that you pick up in real life has a texture. The pop can that you hold has a rather smooth texture, while the bit of tree bark that you might pick up from your backyard lawn will have a texture that is very rough and knotted.
Because texture is an important part of life, naturally the artist has to find some way to mimic texture over a two dimensional surface. The way artists do this is through the alteration of different regions within the picture, putting contrasting colours and shades of light and dark next to each other. This serves to create the impression of depth in an image and along with that comes an impression of texture from the relief that is displayed within the depth of the image.
This is usually extremely hard for an artist to do well. The good news for us graphic designers however is that many pieces of graphic design software (like Photoshop) will do a lot of texture for us, so we don’t have to do it ourselves. I’ll talk more about that later, when texture becomes more important.
Elements of Graphic Design: The Line
Justin Lemaire
The line is the most basic unit of graphic design and it is undoubtedly something you already have great experience with, even if you happen to never have done anything artistic before. A line is a simple form that contains width and length but at the same time does not contain any depth and for that reason is a wholly two dimensional structure. Lines can be used in graphic design for the creation of borders, outlines or anything else that might be used to provide contrast with the shapes and surrounding areas of design within the final graphical product.
One way in which lines are particularly useful is in the conveyance of a particular mood or feeling. For example, horizontal lines suggest a feeling of quiet calm, which is why graphics such as sunrises or sunsets will frequently be accompanied by areas of horizontal lining. Vertical lining, on the other hand, is associated more with the idea of movement rather than static calm and diagonal or haphazard lining has this feeling in the extreme. The next time you’re looking at pictures, look for the directions and orientations of lines and see if you can see the feelings suggested here in the lines that are drawn on those pictures. That’ll be your first assignment on the road to being an excellent graphic designer.
Next time we’ll cover a few more sub-elements related to the line element of graphic design.
