How To Create STUNNING Layouts - 5 Tips 😲

how do you design overwhelmingly good layouts well the number one thing about graphic design is your layout how you lay out information in a graphic way or how you lay out graphics on a piece of paper on a poster and an instagram post how do you do it very well i've been a graphic designer for years now and i have seen many layouts i've created many layouts for different companies for different pieces of work layouts has been the number one most important thing i've learned in good graphic design and it really does set you apart when you know how to create a good layout so today i'm going to be giving you at least five tips at least five on creating stunning layouts this video is brought to you by millernote before i get into it i just want to say thanks for watching this video also a lot of you aren't subscribed that watch it's free helps me out it'll help you out with all the amazing information we've got on the channel so go ahead press that red subscribe button okay so if you're new to graphic design a layout is what is on the page it's how you lay out information in different blocks graphic design is all about giving you the easiest way to view information and it can be interesting it can be arty it can be whatever you want it to be but good layout is sometimes difficult to do now in this video i'm not going to be going over hierarchy or contrast or weight i'm just going to be going ahead and talking about pure layout fundamentals so the first tip i'm going to give you is using grids this seems pretty obvious yeah we know about the grids it's just the grid paper that you use and you can create whatever you want grids are not just boxes on a screen that you use to line up your work grids can be pretty crazy you can have perspective grids too grids allow you to place your work or assets or information in an orderly fashion on a piece of paper grids take a lot of the work out of a layout for you if you see this poster that i'm designing right now i am literally using a 17 by 21 grid and what this does is it allows me to very consistently put assets and information on this poster you can see that i'm making sure that my typography is from left to right so people are having an easy time reading it obviously there's like hierarchy and weight balance going on here but where my assets are going on in this poster you can tell that it's been laid out pretty easily now what if i wanted to create more of a landscape poster we can see here in this sped up video that the landscape poster is doing the same thing got a four column grid that's allowing the information to flow to left to right up to down and it's still visually interesting because the grids allow me to be more creative and i'm a firm believer that when you have restrictions like when you have grids or something then it's going to make you more creative because it's a problem to solve a good way to think of grids is not a restrictive thing but as a guide and that's the way that i use them it's kind of like having a metronome when you're playing an instrument or a click track you play in time and all it does is that it lets your work be in time with the composition everything is there for you now grids can get super weird and you can get really strange compositions if you don't know what a composition is it's all the assets together in one on the layout but layout design is fundamentally the way that you place the objects and if you know the fundamentals from contrast and hierarchy which you know you should if you're learning design then using the grid for layout is pretty easy the next tip is the rule of thirds you've heard this all over the place i'm sure but does anyone really know what they're doing with it well the rule of thirds is a very basic grid it's just a three by three grid you see it in your iphone or your camera because that's the way that a lot of photographers compose their photographs well in design this grid can be used just like the last one but it's a very simple one it really means that you have a nice proportion on the screen so for instance in this poster that i'm designing i've got a portrait image of a man i go ahead and i put him on the grid and you can see me lining it up i know i sort of want my text on the left because we read left to right and i want an image on the right hand side so i'm looking at this sort of poster as more like a magazine cover or a piece in a magazine so my man is on the right and i've gridded him up so i've got enough space although i could have found a better image to illustrate this better i've gridded him up so he fits along the page but he's also giving us enough room on the left as you can see through those grid lines i will not let him go through those grid lines now my lettering and all the typography goes into that blank space on the left what we've done here is created a really nice proportional balance and what grids do is allow you to place assets nicely but the rule of thirds allows you to create nice proportions and composition on the page but don't be scared if you don't know how to create grids or you don't know what you're doing with grit there's loads of books online like raster systems which is a hugely beneficial book for you to read but the way that i create grids inside of illustrator is i use my rectangle tool i draw around my area so that's my artboard i go to object i go down to path and then split into grid and i make my grid from there then i go to command 5 or go to view guides create guides and it will create some guides for me to use all you need to do is start practicing with that create a poster do something nice i've got plenty of posters even ones i've done for adobe for certain anniversary events for indesign i've created lots of different things for different clients with this same method the third layout tip because i realized that this video is talked a lot about grids but it's a huge thing is repeating elements design should be consistent no matter where you are unless it's like an art style let's say consistent design allows for a brand to be repeated it allows for you to have a system and what consistency does is it makes it easier on the brain to read that's why we don't read from top to bottom all the time with letters going down it's why we read left to right even on a poster and any signage that even looks cool or any poster we have a system in place but by repeating systems and elements in a design for instance a pattern across the board of a poster or a little ornate around a certain piece of illustration or even a color scheme so you repeat only a few selected colors allows it to be a lot more professional and easier to read if you're a beginning in design or maybe you've been a designer for a while but you struggle with the restrictions that you've put on yourselves so you just sort of put loads of colors down loads of fonts down loads of different ideas down and then at the end your design work looks a bit messy and doesn't look very professional well that is because you have not restricted enough the best way to restrict yourself is by repeating certain elements you can see in my adobe poster that i repeated this certain pattern in a block modular grid and this made it look pretty cool i didn't do anything really fancy i just repeated certain elements you can see some plus signs some mathematical signs you know the divide the times and the equals in this post-it as well all the way around i just repeated those because when the brain has seen something it's familiar to see it again so you don't have to be spending a lot of time there's not loads of detail which brings me on to the next one which is technically the fourth one i think but it's called balance balance is huge we create balance through symmetry or giving the illusion that something has enough weight on one side as well as the other a good poster will be balanced from left to right and it will have a good amount of assets on there that work so it needs to be readable simplistic or however you want the poster to be but as long as it's legible and it's balanced overall in its composition it's a good poster and that's the one thing that i look for and most designers look for in any design is it balanced because if it's not it's unbalanced and it feels weird looks weird doesn't work we can see in all my posters that the way that i get balance is through using assets that are repeating but also in my hand lettering i use and many others use symmetry in all my compositions on instagram where i do hand lettering you could put a line straight down vertically down and it will look roughly the same as to the left and the right the symmetry creates balance and that's why you can do all these cool mandala things inside of illustrator where they repeat all the way around it's really fun like these symmetry brushes but balance is achieved by creating certain weights on either side that look similar that's why we use the rule of thirds good composition has good balance within it talking about balancing things out what about the white space the next tip is using white space white space is the area of a layout that you leave blank and the problem that a lot of designers have at the start of their careers or anyone who's just learning is that they're afraid to leave certain things blank now the reason for this is probably because you don't have the eye for balance or the eye for design yet which comes over experience not even joking in just two years time you'll be shocked at what you will recognize now as good design and that will keep happening every so often you'll just start realizing your old work wasn't as good as your new work but white space is super important in design too much content in a layout is overwhelming so having enough space around it really opens it up and lets it breathe now this is obviously different if your design direction is meant to be a bit confusing which i wouldn't suggest doing because the client who wants it to be overwhelming and confusing obviously doesn't understand people very well but let your work breathe have a white space don't be afraid use it tastefully don't go ultra minimalism all the time everyone gets sick of ultra minimalistic simplistic logo design but white space is good and you can see within my posters here especially with the kingdom come logo there's a lot of white space around this the reason being is if i scaled this logo up so it fit the 1920 by 1080 artboard it would just look awful it needs to be scaled down and there needs to be a nice balance of white space at the top bottom left and right the same is for posters make sure you have a nice not a bleed but this space on either side of the content from up down left and right this will frame your work and make it easier for people to see white space is all to do with you know hierarchy and those fundamentals as well which we'll get into another video now before i go into the last tip which will change your life i want to thank miller note for sponsoring this video you're most likely a designer or someone who wants to be a designer and if you are wanting to be a designer or even if you already are then miller note has got you covered miller notes is an app that i use to control all my ideation with clients by myself it's like a whiteboard online that you can use to collaborate all you simply have to do is drag in images to it and you can create a mood board you can create a project brief i've got tons of boards in there for different projects each project gets its own board with like a creative briefing there a place where i can write notes about the project if i have something that is inspiring me or if there's some sort of mood board that i'm doing for that project i'll shove it in there so the client can review it's a great place for me to upload my end artwork as well so if the client needs the files i'll just upload the files to miller note on the page that they can see and edit and they can download it really no it's more like working on the wall in a creative studio it allows you just to place things in there very visually instead of doing all tech space like in some other applications i truly love miller note and i've been using them regardless of being sponsored by them for years now and you will not be disappointed because you can sign up for completely free and use it today with the link down below in the description so sign up for free the link is down there go check it out now the last method that i promised to give you is really life-changing and it is the box method and this is one i started using within hand lettering when i'm creating a composition for my hand lettering it's very difficult to like work out where the words should be to make the composition nice you can have any words composed very nicely and it will be hand lettering the box method is basically instead of using words we use shapes we use boxes so if you're doing a typographic poster and you wanted to work out the composition the hierarchy the weight and all you do is use a box and what this does is it allows you to quickly wireframe absolutely everything that you need all the information in that poster you can do this with photographs you can do it for web pages which a lot of people do it is basically just wireframing for a web page seeing where all the content blocks should be even in my kingdom come logo where it's more of like a badge and it's more like a highlighted illustration i've even shown you here the frame which is the circle the oval around it but i've also shown you that i've got a small block big block small block and those small blocks are the things i don't want you to read at first they're kind of like they're not the most important part of the composition kingdom definitely is and then that you know come at the end thy kingdom come you know is as least important so it's easily readable and it looks balanced because it's symmetrical so if you're struggling with creating a composition then just write down the words on a piece of paper or just write them down in illustrator draw a box like use a rectangle tool to draw a box around them and then move those boxes inside of a gridded composition to see where they should fit and if they fit nicely you can change the sizing of the boxes depending on how big the type is going to be then you'll have yourself a very nice composition without having to even read anything you can tell if a piece of work is going to be composed and laid out well just by the shape of the composition those boxes because that's all type is they're all in boxes and we want to make sure that each part of the layout is correct each asset within there so that's it those are my five tips on composition those are just a few and you probably have tons more to say but i don't want to make this video longer than it needs to be because you guys got stuff to do and things to design so if you do have any more tips and please do share them down below in the comments section and i will try to respond or i will look at it and everyone else can have a little gander down there too to get more tips thanks for watching if you haven't already please press that red subscribe button if you did enjoy the video and you reckon it will help someone you know then go ahead and share the video with them it really does help thanks for watching see you in the next video goodbye you

Channel: Will Paterson

Views: 30,585

Rating: 4.9682093 out of 5

Keywords: design, vlog, graphic, art, photoshop, illustrator, adobe, Layout desing, layout, Layout design, how to design a layout, amazing layouts, layouts in Adobe Illustrator, Grids, Design grids, how to use grids, grids in design, adobe photoshop, graphic layouts, will paterson, william paterson, patterson, patinson, will pate, pat, will paterson logo design, fiverr, logo fiverr

Id: 9JiKfJdXZWU

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021