Design, Before Any Software

Design fails on ranking, not on taste. This course covers what the eye lands on first and how to control it, grouping by distance, alignment and grids, type measured in characters rather than adjectives, colour contrast you can check against a number, composition and cropping, designing for a 390-pixel phone in daylight, a nine-step way to diagnose a layout that looks wrong, and how to translate "make it pop" into a specific change.

1. 1Your poster is not ugly, it is unranked9 minA design has a hierarchy only if things differ enough to be ranked at a glance, and promoting one element means demoting another.
2. 2The gap is doing the talking9 minThe eye assigns things to groups by distance before it reads a word, so the space inside a group must be obviously smaller than the space around it.
3. 3You can feel a misalignment you cannot see9 minEvery element should share an edge with something else, and where the alignment tool and your eye disagree, trust your eye.
4. 4Your font is fine, your line is too long10 minSet the line length to 45-75 characters before you touch the typeface, because most "hard to read" is a measure problem wearing a font costume.
5. 5A palette will not save an unreadable page10 minBuild palettes by moving lightness rather than hue, check every text pair against a contrast number, and never let colour be the only thing carrying a meaning.
6. 6The rule of thirds is a nudge, not a law9 minDecide first whether the picture wants balance or tension, then check the four edges — the thirds grid is only useful for stopping you centring a horizon.
7. 7Design it at 390 pixels or find out the hard way9 minDesign at 360-390 pixels wide and test on a cheap phone in daylight, because shrinking a desktop layout hides the faults that expanding a phone layout exposes.
8. 8Nine checks that find what is wrong with a layout10 minDiagnose in order — hierarchy, value, spacing, alignment, inventory — because a fault in structure cannot be fixed with colour, and colour work done first gets thrown away.
9. 9Make it pop is a symptom report9 minTreat client feedback as a description of a symptom and do the diagnosis yourself, and use mirroring and a five-second test to see your own work as a stranger would.