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.
