Alignment and Spacing | Basic Principles of Graphic Design [Ep. 02]

I want you guys to become better graphic designer so let's continue our series about the graphic design principles in this video we are going to discover what I consider the second most important rule of graphic design and that is alignment we will talk about two very important things that good alignment will allow you to achieve in your design we'll talk about the different ways of aligning elements and also we'll discover the different tools that canva has to assist us with alignment and just like for the previous episode I will be digging into our Facebook Community to bring up both some good and bad examples of how to use alignment let's do this what is up everyone Ronnie here welcome back to our Channel today I am all pumped because we are continuing our series about the graphic design fundamentals today's topic is alignment so let's jump right into it I have prepared a presentation and the first part of the presentation is simply to try to give a simple definition of what alignment is so I found this very simple and straightforward definition on Google and it says alignment is the placement of visual elements so they line up in a composition okay so nothing really fancy about this definition but what's really interesting to me is why should we align our elements on our design what are we trying to achieve by creating this alignment and basically it comes down to two different goals we are trying to achieve with alignment the first one is to improve the overall legibility of our design to make the information that is on your page on your design on your canvas easier to digest for the viewer that is the first overall goal of alignment the second one is to influence the way viewers will discover the design elements on your page or on your design but also hopefully trigger some sort of behavior or specific actions because of the way the elements are aligned on this page okay so two main goals for alignment to make the information on your designs easier to understand for the viewer and second to influence some sort of behavior so try to remember that and I will be bringing up some examples in this video that will help you better understand or visually understand what this means all right so what we are going to do we are going to dive a little bit deeper in each of these two main goals of alignment starting with improving the legibility of our designs by improving their composition and the first thing I really want to draw your attention to is that canva makes it easy for us to properly align our elements indeed canva has a bunch of buttons and features to help us to assist us so what I suggest is that we jump into the canva editor and have a look at what these tools are okay so I am here in the canva editor and I have one single runny pineapple here it is one of my bitmojis I thought I would use this to kind of show you so basically this is an element could be a graphic could be a photo could be a line or shape anything really a piece of text it doesn't matter everything I'm going to show you these buttons you will be able to use them for any element any visual element in canva so where to find them first you need to select your element and then go to the position button right here on top and then you will find your alignment to page tools okay so very simply you can align your element to the top of your page so this will bring up your element all the way to the top of the page to the middle or to the bottom okay so remember this first column top middle bottom and then you can align to the left Center or right if you want Center and middle which is where elements by default will be positioned when you bring them from the object panel they will always be centered and in the middle of the page so this is uh very quickly the first thing I wanted to show you the second thing I want to show you is these assisting lines that you see so by default also if it is turned on you should see the safe zone of your design right here and if you get with an element if you get close to this safe Zone it will become of a different color pink color and your element will kind of snap to these lines right here just remember that this Frame that you see here represents the safe Zone like the Zone within you should stay when you design to absolutely make sure when you print or when you publish in different formats this will not be lost or like part of your design won't be cropped okay so stay within the safe zone so that's the first thing in terms of assisting lines I would say another assisting line that you are probably already familiar with is the middle line so the line that shows you you are actually now right at the middle of your page and again your element will snap you will feel it snap when you get to the middle and similarly to the center like so okay so it's easy for us to align our elements there all right so these were the most basic alignment features in canva I would say something else that you absolutely need to do every time you start a design I mean you could probably survive without it for a designer too but if you are serious about becoming a good graphic designer and using canva you should absolutely always always turn on the rulers and guides so rulers and guides can be fine under your file button right here the file menu if you click on file and then this option right here show rulers and guides and there is also a shortcut a keyboard shortcut which is shift R okay so click on this and you should see your rulers both on the left side and the top of your screen and the guides are if you click on the ruler and drag these lines that you can bring to your design and you can move them you can place them wherever you like so these will really become from your best friend to help you align your elements for example you want to align Ronnie pineapple into a specific position on your page so I have added my guides here my two guides I just need to go fine runny pineapple in my bitmojis right here make runny pineapple a little bit smaller and now that I have these two guys it's very easy to come and position runny pineapple right there exactly what I want him and again this element will snap into your guides so it's really easy canva makes it super easy for you to use these guys something else I like about the guys is once you have placed them on one of your pages they stay on the other pages and this will really be useful when it comes to creating specific layouts or compositions for example from a template let's say you find a template that you really like and you want to recreate something similar but keep the same compositions keep the same layout so let me show you an example of that I have imported one page of a specific canva template website that I found interesting in the template Library this template right here and I would like to reproduce a similar landing page but with different information so I'm going to be using the guides and by all means like these are still the guys from runny pineapple but to get rid of a guide you just take the guide and drag it outside of your page you drop it anywhere in the gray Zone and the guide will disappear remember shift R to bring the guides and rulers and shift R to make them disappear that's what I'm doing right here so what I'm going to do here is to position a bunch of different guides on this canva template this home page template so that I can easily reproduce it on the next page this page right here the second page of my design so let's go ahead and do this I'm going to bring a guide from Top first and position it on top of my home button similarly at the bottom and then all of these elements are pretty much aligned on the safe Zone here but I'm still positioning a guide a guide here for my text box right here a guide for my text box at the bottom of this text box and then I have a second piece of text here like so and then I have my code to action which needs to be between these two guides okay I think I have something good here so if I scroll down to my white page now I can start reproducing this home page with my own element so I'm going to speed up the video but I'm going to do that and show you the final results so there you go guys I have recreated a similar looking home page if we compare the two of them we see a lot of similarities between the two pages but this time I use all of my very own elements and it was very easy because all I had to do was position the elements within the guides I had created and again I can get rid of the guides after I'm done by shift R and there we go now I have let me collapse this panel as well so there you go I have reproduced this homepage layout this home page composition based on my guide so let me bring them back so this was made possible really because when I positioned some guys on a page they also show on the following pages of my document so very very convenient to work with guys in canva and I strongly recommend you to do so there is just one thing I wish canva had when it comes to guides and maybe there is this feature but I haven't found it yet so if you do know how to do this please let me know in the comment section below I'm talking about getting rid of all the guides all at once so I'm not talking about making them Disappear by showing and hiding the guide no I'm talking about getting rid of them like clearing the page of all the guides instead of having to do it one by one like I'm doing right now so if you know how to do this please let me know in the comment section but otherwise you will have to tick each of your guides and drag them out of your page one by one like I'm doing right now let me take another canva template and show you another example of what you can achieve with guides so for example this layout this composition right here is very well aligned because the creator of this template has used the guides and align their elements as you can see what I'm doing here is positioning the guides to show you how well aligned everything is on this design so you will see that every single word is perfectly aligned both horizontally and vertically so if I go as far as taking the vertical lines like so you will see that the distance between each of the elements is perfect and everything is well aligned so I could continue this but then I know I will have to take out all of these guys one by one so I'm not gonna do the entire design but you see what I'm talking about here again I'm going to make them disappear perfect quickly align slide like a bunch of different visual elements on this one but this is really made easy with the guides alignment will also help us space the different elements in our design in relation to each other in order to create more structure like visually grouping elements or in order to create more balance on your design because your elements are evenly spread evenly separated or spread on your page and I would like to show you another set of tools that canva has this time not to align your elements but to space them properly in relation to each other so let's jump back into canva and I'm going to show you where to find these tools so I have six runny pineapples this time and I would like to show you a couple of different things let's say I want to make this smaller slightly smaller like so and I would like to create a line a straight line of all of these runny pineapples and kind of spread them evenly okay so something like this but I would like to make sure there is the same distance between all of these pineapples so I could grab lines or guys like so and make sure I align them but there is actually an easier way to do this I'm going to select all of them go back to my position button right here and this time focus on the lower section of this menu space evenly and I will observe that I can either paste evenly vertically but here there are already all pretty much spaced evenly vertically or horizontally if I choose horizontally Canada will apply the same amount of distance between each of the pineapples like so so this is super useful but in order for this to work you need to select everything and now when I select them again I can see that they are all separated by the same distance okay so let's select them all I'm gonna group them and now I can use the position button again to align this group of elements either in the middle Center so if I want everything to be centered middle Center and now all of these pineapples are perfectly centered and have the same distance between themselves and there are other options out there I'm going to ungroup all of this and now I'm going to show you the other version of this to space evenly vertically maybe only four this time position space evenly vertically there we go now we have created a nice line of runny pineapple vertical line like so okay so this is how you use this feature if you use a tidy up feature right here basically what canva will do is to apply both of the filter they will be spaced evenly vertically and horizontally and look more tidy so I think these features are super useful so this will allow it to work much more precisely on our designs and create things like this design right here where you see really different groups of elements but everything is separated by the same distance so for example these lines right here there are basically being spread evenly horizontally so that's how you create the same distance between like equal columns you create a couple of lines and then you select them all and you space them evenly and I can see they even have been grouped here on the design so I can ungroup them like so and now I can select them separately so all of these lines have been spaced evenly so that is one of the applications I would say of using these commands to space your elements all right we are making some good progress here guys I hope you're liking this video by all means if you do like it please leave us a like this will help us with the visibility on YouTube and if you haven't yet subscribed to our channel here on YouTube I don't know what to tell you this is the best place to learn about canva and graphic design I don't know what to do all right back to the video we have a couple of more things to cover the next point I want to tackle is how to use alignment to visually group elements together okay because when elements are aligned on your design they seem to be related to one another more related to one another than elements that are not aligned on the design so for illustrating this I have these two photos I right here running Indiana but for my photo I have aligned my name to the photo like you see here for Diana I didn't do that and weirdly I perceived that the photo of Ronnie is associated with the name Ronnie while when I look at the other side of the screen Diana is not so mad I mean look at we know it's Diana but still like our brain don't process the information at the same speed so visually grouping by aligning elements together will make them be perceived as belonging together alright so this is a very important concept and I wanted to jump back into canva to show you some more examples of this starting with this one right here which is a slide that I could really use for example during a zoom meeting to do some sort of exercise with the rest of my team so we can see here team alignment meeting and we have a bunch of information here on this side of the page and then the company logo and then here a couple of boxes where from the first look at this page I understand okay this is where I will have to fill up these boxes and we will brainstorm here but this part of the screen so everything on this side seems to be the guidelines or some elements that I might have to be using some information giving me some context about this page about this exercise so because these have been aligned to the left and also kind of grouped together because everything here is a line to the left and then the rest here in the boxes is mostly like you see this text boxes in the middle is centered so there's a different type of alignment being used for these other elements so because of that I understand my brain processes that this bunch of information right here belongs together and indeed these are the guidelines for the exercise all right moving on to the next example I have here here again very Sim simple the information has been grouped with alignment so here is a different type of alignment it's a central alignment if you draw a line or if you bring a guide here in the middle we can see that all of these three elements are aligned evenly but at the center and the same for these right here and also the same basically like the middle of this icon is on the same vertical line as the middle of this icon and similarly horizontally the middle of this icon is the same as the middle of this icon so here again alignment allows us to create groups visual groups that make us understand makes our brain process the information faster because we understand these belong together in last example same thing here a new product a new Apple computer we have the computer and then we have visually grouped everything here by aligning all of these I would say specs of the computer with separating lines but also aligning the text exactly here at the same size and we can see the lines are aligned and evenly spaced and also each of the text boxes starts on this guide right here so a line to the left so there you go a couple of different examples showing you how alignment can help you group elements together so that they make sense together they are perceived as belonging together there is an important rule when it comes to alignment and that is that every single element in a design should be aligned with at least one other element there shouldn't be any element just hanging out there by itself unless it's very intentional and we'll talk about this in a second but everything every single piece of element on your design should be aligned with something else with another visual element let me show you an example when it's not the case when we look at this slide we see three words and they seem to have been placed on this page on this canvas in a random way in an arbitrary manner because there is no proper alignment like it's not aligned on the safe Zone none of the word is properly aligned with another one either vertically or horizontally so this seems random okay and you don't want that to happen in your design you don't want to give the impression that you're randomly executing randomly placing elements because there is no space for run Randomness in good graphic design everything should have or should be where it is for a good reason right so that's kind of what we expect so let me now Show You by simply aligning these elements to the left how everything could look much more ordered much more stable much more structured on the page just because I have now ordered these elements and aligned them to the left but also space them evenly vertically so there is the same amount of distance in between each of the text boxes so this is just a simple trick to show you how much alignment is important to show professionalism to show structure to show that there is a deliberate decision behind every single placement of your elements on the page okay now I would like to fetch a couple of designs from our Facebook Community to show you some less good examples of the use of alignment okay again I'm not doing this to blame or laugh at anyone I just thought okay there's so much designs out there let's grab a couple of bad examples to show you really how important good alignment is okay so I imported them into my canva editor already so this is the first design and at the first look it looks okay but if I keep looking at this design for a little bit longer then there's something that I cannot quite point my finger at what it is the first couple of seconds I look at it but this is kind of something off about this design and when you look a bit deeper into it you realize it is small alignment mistakes that make this design uneasy on the eyes so let's use some guys to analyze what is not completely properly aligned on this design so let's bring a first guide and position it here so this is kind of like the obvious I'm going to zoom in a bit like so this is kind of like the obvious way of aligning these text boxes this is the main text so that's fine again I'm gonna drag an another guide right here and I'm going to position it on the second text box right here Monica gold okay and I can see the third line right here learn how to break your way into the multi-million industry this one is not properly aligned it's not touching the guide so it's slightly off you see this may be like half a centimeter here but this half centimeter gives me an odd feeling when I look at this let's continue adding some guides for example I can see that this line right here learn how to break into the multi-million industry it's been justified in the middle while the rest of the text is kind of Justified to the left so this gives me a second weird feeling because this last word right here industry is not aligned with anything else right here and then we have this text box right here host again it's not aligned with anything else it sits in the middle of the first word here and here it's not aligned with anything else so these small alignment mistakes are kind of messing up my design right here see also the YouTube logo it's not properly aligned with the number 21. and here again like we don't have enough space between the two logos so all of these are I would say alignment related mistakes let me Zoom back to fit the page and get rid of these guides before we move on to the next design and again if you know how to get rid of all the guides please let me know in the comments I'm getting tired of getting rid of these guys okay the second design I would like to comment on very quickly again from the Facebook group is this one so this one same feeling I have a feeling well first of all there is too much like there's not enough white space but that would be for another episode of the design fundamentals white space will be one of the future episodes but that's not what I want to talk about here I want to focus on alignment so let's bring the guys once more and start grabbing where each of these elements starts okay so for example these two moons right here with an animal we can see the cat is touching the this guide but the koala is not so it's just like randomly placed here and also at the bottom it's not really should be at the bottom of the cat it would be more aligned uh yeah so just some small mistakes of alignment like this one right here not aligned with anything else either all right I'm not gonna expand any further on this design but my point here was to demonstrate to you that small alignment mistakes could really generate a weird feeling in the viewer when they look at the design they might not immediately be able to point the finger out what's wrong but they really understand something is wrong and most of the time it's small alignment mistakes so make sure you use all of the tools I have showed you in this tutorial to properly align your elements as this will really improve the quality of your compositions now in some cases you might want to break that rule to break the rules of alignment on purpose because you want to highlight or you want to create some sort of effect where you have everything aligned like you have your ducks in a row and then you have one thing that sticks out and this sticking out element is going to be probably going to be the focus on your design like I did on this page right here some cases you might want to break these principles of alignment to create a sense of disorder you see how everything is aligned here on this particular line right here but the word disorder sticks out because I broke the rule of alignment now just be conscious and when you break the rules first you need to do this with moderation don't do it too much otherwise it's not going to work and second you have to do it deliberately like you have to do it knowing what you do and really using that chaos that disorder that you generated to your advantage all right so that is how you can sometimes break the rules of a line assignment to achieve specific effects and this leads leads the second goal we are trying to achieve with alignment and that is to influence the behavior of the viewer or to give a good reason to the viewer to take a specific action because we are guiding them to that action to that specific goal that we have with our design an easy way to do that is to create a specific structure of flow on a specific piece of design and an easy way to create that flow to create that structure is to use pre-existing layouts or compositions and the good news is that for the presentation doctype in canva canva actually has a new feature which gives you a bunch of different pre-made layouts so let me show you where to find them the first thing is that you will need to be in a presentation document you cannot find the layouts in other types of documents right now so make sure you are in the presentation document and then head over to the templates tab in the object panel right here the first one on the top and then you will see templates that will be the default tab but if you switch over to your rights you should see layouts so click on layouts and there you should see a bunch of different page layouts you see all layouts with some already pre-made structures for you I very regularly use these layouts when I create decks for our tutorials for example so I would encourage you to have a look at these layouts just remember that for now they only exist in the presentation doctype and one of the reasons why you use a specific layout is to actually create that structure right to lead the eye of the viewer in a specific path so if we look at this slide right here you see a photo of myself a headline and then two columns of text and I would say that the natural way of looking at this page is to First focus on the photo then read the headlines then read the First Column and then move on to the second column on the right so this is kind of like the traditional way of reading this page and that is because Western readers so people who speak languages like English or French or Spanish or you know western part of the world tend to read in a specific pattern and that pattern is left to right and top to down okay now this will be different in languages like Chinese or Hebrew or Arabic because they have different reading patterns sometimes is right to left sometimes it is up to down it depends but for the West Western World the reading pattern is left to right and top to down and this leads me to a well-known graphic design concept called the F shape pattern the f-shaped pattern is a concept that is widely used in web design to create specific landing pages but also to create an intentional flow on these pages that will guide the user to a specific point where they will have to make a decision and this path that has been created following an f-shaped pattern will pretty much correspond to the websites creators goal what do we want to achieve with this page let me give you a real world example let's take this Airbnb landing page okay become a host host your space share your world and then a button try hosting now let me gray out the design itself and let's try to look at this from a heat map perspective so where do we look at first when we look at a page like this one well it's probably able that you will look at this logo right here on top or you might start looking at the main headline so this one right here and then the second thing is that you'll probably be directed to the photo and the guy's face most likely looking right in the middle of his face around the eye level next you will probably read the second text paragraph right here which gives you some additional information and this will lead you to the call to action or the button on the home page that says try hosting so when we look at the pattern in which we have discovered the information on this page it looks like an app so that is why it is called the F shape pattern and it leads us to the button which is the action that we intentionally want the viewer to take all right guys we have covered a ton of information about the design principle of alignment we've seen that alignment is mostly used for two good reasons the first one is to create more legibility in our design through improving our compositions okay alignment will create a structure and bring more order to the design it will help us consume the information on the page and it will also help by creating connections between different elements or visual groups so that is the first main goal we are trying to reach with alignment the second goal is to influence viewers behavior and lead them to a specific place where they hopefully will take a specific action that will bring us closer as a Creator as a designer to our goals okay so we do that by again creating structure by Leading the eyes of the viewer with alignment and reading patterns and this should help us trigger specific actions from the viewer all right guys we have made a lot of work in this tutorial I'm Gonna Leave You with the link to the playlist with the other design principles the other episode I have created in this series so go ahead and watch this next

Channel: Design with Canva

Views: 5,825

Keywords: alignment in design, principles of design, graphic design principles, design theory, canva easy tutorial, canva tutorial 2022, canva tips 2022, principles of graphic design, graphic design beginners, graphic design beginners guide, graphic design for beginners guide, graphic designer beginner guide, graphic design fundamentals, graphic design, fundamentals design, design fundamentals, graphic design basics, beginner graphic design, design rules

Id: JymLoJopwf8

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022