Background

This course is for people who find themselves with design responsibilities but who have had no formal design training.

You will cover the five essential building blocks of design, look at working with type and colour and discover how to resolve common design problems.

This course is designed to help you uncover hidden skills and to improve your confidence when making design decisions.

This is a print design based course - there is also a version of this course for web designers, the Web Design Masterclass course.

Course Outline

DAY ONE

WHAT IS DESIGN?
Good and bad design
Five questions to ask before you
design anything

KEY DESIGN ELEMENTS
A guide to relevance, contrast,
proportion, consistency, direction, totality and restraint
he five building blocks of design

LAYING OUT YOUR PAGE
Using the page organisation tools
Using the text organisation tools

WORKING WITH TONE AND SPACE
Using white space
Rules, borders, boxes and
drop shadows
Creating bleeds

THE POWER OF TYPE
Type history and type decisions
Type families
Tips and techniques for
presenting type
Special type effects
Widows and orphans

DAY TWO

WORKING WITH COLOUR
Different colour models
Choosing colours
Spot colours
Printing colours
Incorporating photographs
Illustrations or photographs?
Designing with photographs

SHORTCUTS TO GOOD DESIGN
Maintaining a swipe file
AIDA: the four secret ingredients of good design

SOLVING COMMON DESIGN PROBLEMS
Rivers of white space
Inappropriate column spacing
Claustrophobic pages
Whispering headlines
Floating heads and subheads
Too few/too many typefaces

Questions and answers