It is important to always put at the forefront, legibility and clarity. Remember that our jobs as graphic designers is to communicate and organize information. Typesetting helps polish up a design piece to achieve clarity and comfortability. Not many designers put this level of attention to detail, but if you do, it speaks volumes.
Understanding Readability and Legibility
Readability relates to how type is set on a page. It is the arrangement of fonts and words in order to make written content flow in a simple and easy to read manner. Legibility is how a typeface functions. It is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish letters or words from one another and how easy blocks of text are read. There are different factors like x-height, character, width, weight, and other design traits that can determine if a font is legible.
Essential Typesetting Factors
Size Considerations
The smaller the type size, the more difficult it is to read, especially if your audience includes children or elderly people. Always consider who you’re designing the content for.
Line Length and Column Width
As a rule of thumb, there should be between 45 and 70 characters per line. When the column width is too narrow, it can result in many hyphenated words, forcing the eyes to jump to the next line too often. On the other hand, long lines can cause confusion for the reader when they go from line to line.
Leading and Line Spacing
The amount of letting you will need in a text box is based on the type size and the x-height of the font you’re using. To maximize readability, make sure there is enough line spacing, because too little line spacing can result on the lines crashing into each other.
Tracking and Letter Spacing
This refers to the space between a group of letters in a line of text. Adjusting the tracking can enhance readability and change the texture of a text box.
Kerning
Kerning is the adjustment of the space between two individual characters within a word. It is mostly used in logos or headings to enhance legibility.
Text Alignment
In paragraphs of Western text, alignment refers to the invisible vertical lines implied by a block of type. When type is left-aligned, each new line begins from the same point on the x-axis. Right alignment isn’t used that often, and center alignment should only be used for short form text.
Managing Rags
These are the uneven vertical emergence on a block of text when it is left-aligned or right-aligned. You can fix them by hyphenating words where necessary or doing a soft return for a new line break. Rags are more about visual appearance, but the reading phase needs to also be considered here.
Fixing Rivers
These are gaps that appear to run through a block of text, which usually appear in justified text. A common way to fix this is by un justifying the text or typesetting each line with hyphenation and soft returns.
Handling Orphans and Widows
An orphan is a paragraph opening line at the beginning of a page or column that separated from the rest of the text. And a widow is a single word or line at the end of a paragraph that’s separated from the rest of the text. These two problems can be solved by adjusting the kerning or tracking or by adding manual line breaks.
Font Case Types
Uppercase is when every character is capitalized in a sentence. Lower case is when no letters are capitalized. Sentence case is when the first letter of the first word in a sentence is capitalized. And title case is the first letter of each word capitalized.
Good typographic use is important in order to communicate messages successfully. Our graphic designing course in Pakistan teaches you all these fundamentals with practical exercises.
Graphic Designing Course in Karachi: Design Disciplines
When you join our graphic designing course in Karachi, you will learn how, depending on the discipline, you will have to make different design choices. And always keeping in mind that there is a brief to work off, a design solution that needs to be achieved, a message to be communicated, and a user whom we are designing for. We’ll take a look at print design, digital product design, digital design, and brand design.
Print Design Fundamentals
Print design is any design where the final form is intended to be printed. Since the rise of digital tools, every design will most likely be designed on a computer, but the end product will be printed. This covers anything like brochures, shopping bags, stickers, labels, book covers, posters, business cards, flyers, and magazines.
Poster Design
Every designer has designed at least one poster in their career. The top priority of a poster design is to expose key information. And for it to be easy to read from a distance, the use of space and hierarchy are very important here.
On this poster, we can see that it has balanced by placing a text group in the center, and the design elements of both sides of the poster. There is high contrast, not only in the background, but also in the text size, so this helps establish hierarchy. The background adds a nice touch of movement to what could’ve been a static group of design elements.
While there’s contrast on the colors of the background, the designer also used cool tones. This is balanced with the black and white type to not create more visual noise. The font used here is a Sans serif. Super easy to read from long distances, the text is concise, the date and the time are grouped together, and hashtags have another little group at the bottom.
So it is divided in good harmony and with good use of hierarchy.
Book Design
Books started off as ancient scrolls back in the fourth millennium BCE. Books have been part of our daily lives since then, and they have evolved from handwritten, to printed pages, to digitized online. The Books carry out information. This is where typesetting text is important.
As designers, we want to make books that are comfortable and easy to read. In this book design, there are a few type styles that establish hierarchy. The table of content or TOC and the welcome text box have the font and size. This is bigger than the rest, establishing hierarchy that way.
Throughout the pages, we can see repetition through the placement of the ingredients list. Photography is very important when it comes to book design because it helps create contrast between the design elements on a page. There are plenty of ways of displaying images, square, rectangular, and in circles.
Sometimes designers or projects don’t have enough budget to have custom photography, so design assets are totally fine to use. The main text here is set in a Sans serif font since there isn’t long information. A geometric sans serif font is fine, and we can also see contrast between the typefaces.
Magazine Design
Magazines are a direct representation of culture and society. They’ve been used since the 1700s to distribute news and information on general or specific topics. This multi-purpose magazine template would make a great arts and culture magazine or even a fashion magazine.
Each spread achieves a great visual balance between left and right pages. The pages that contain images also create a sense of unity and cohesiveness. Nothing looks like it doesn’t belong. There’s emphasis created with a colored background on certain spreads.
And as for typefaces, the Sans Serif choice makes the publication look contemporary, modern, and clean. There is also a good sense of hierarchy and a play with the folio, the page number, and section.
The difference between magazine design and book design is that with magazine designs, you can get a little bit more creative. Magazines usually have a topic or they’re based on trends as opposed to book designs. These need to be more timeless.
Digital Product Design
What is Digital Product Design?
Many of us have shopped online on Amazon or rented an apartment on Airbnb or have browsed Instagram, not only on our mobile phones but also on desktops. Some of these websites are extremely easy to navigate through the use of design principles and usability. These websites are intuitive when it comes to their use. And this is the UI and UX, all digital product designer’s job.
In the context of product design, a digital product is a software application website or platform. Before 2010, the word product only referred to tangible goods. And now, as software’s have become a normal part of our daily lives, designers and developers now look at these the same as a tangible product.
UI vs UX Design
UI and UX are sometimes used interchangeably, but these two concepts overlap. UX is focused on conducting research on the user’s experience. UI designers focus on these as well, but on a more systematic level, making sure that everything looks good and feels good, so cohesiveness.
Creating Cohesive UI Screens
On this beautiful set of UI screens, we can see how the different screens match with each other. They all have a certain characteristic. Starting with a simple color palette and a call to action that stands out, that will be the buttons.
There’s a great sense of hierarchy through the typographic elements and the typographic system. It is clear which is the title or what information is more important. Overall, there is a great sense of balance and unity through the use of the color palette. The illustration style matches from one screen to the other.
Mobile Design Principles
When it comes to mobile phones displaying complex information, it is important to have order, create hierarchy, balance. Color choices also become important, and it is very systematic. Especially because the information needs to be made clear, it needs to be easy to understand, this is where truly less is more.
Digital Design
Understanding Digital vs Print Design
Graphic design in general focuses mostly on static designs that are printed. Digital design and graphic design can overlap, that’s the case for magazines that get printed but also require a digital version. Digital design can be also static, but it is often displayed on a digital device. It can also sometimes involve movement like animation, modeling, and interactive pages. When it comes to movement, framing is important, it is the way the elements are arranged in the frame, similar to the principles of design, but keeping in mind that there is movement involved.
Static Digital Design Elements
An example of digital design that’s static, but it’s only used on screen would be web graphics. Using a sensor font is ideal, make sure that it is easy to read. The design shouldn’t be too complex because of the small size, and you should use colors that are interesting and also interesting compositions that can catch the eye.
Banner Ads and Digital Marketing
Banner ads are a perfect example of digital design. In this case, we can see multiple sizes, but they all use the same elements. The dark background helps draw attention to the shoes, as well as the light colored typography.
Sans serif fonts can create a sense of urgency, especially when used in all caps. Parts of the information uses a background color to help draw more attention. This type of banner you would usually see in passing when scrolling a website.
So it is very important that this type of design is striking, easy to read, and features an impactful image, so all of the attention goes to it. Digital design and graphic design overlap in most things. The only difference is that, most graphic design elements end are printed, while digital designs are always displayed on screen, and their end use is for screens.
Brand Design Process
Brand design refers to key brand elements like logo, color, skin, typography, and other supporting elements. That make a brand stand out from competitors and one brand that is recognizable to consumers. A good brand helps you understand the company’s history, purpose, values, beliefs through all of these brand design elements. Besides creating a distinct identity for a product or a service, brand design can also encompass the entire image of a company or organization. The key advantage of brand design is that branding the design elements, the language helps you identify with your audience. For instance, if you see a sign or a blog post, anything printed or on screen, it should be clear what company it belongs to.
The Branding Workflow
Client Interview and Discovery
The process started with an interview with a client. In this interview, I asked questions like what inspired the owner to start their own brand, their background, their likes, dislikes. And what type of personality they saw the brand as, so the target market, age, profiles of the type of people who would typically buy this product. It is important to know what questions to ask, to look for inspiration that later can serve us to design the brand. This part of the process is really important because we have to ask many, many questions, as anything at this point can serve as inspiration.
Brand Strategy and Mood Boarding
For the second step based on that interview, I built out a presentation with the direction we want to take the brand in, the essence of the brand, the audience. Keywords that describe the brand, and what makes this brand different from the rest and from the competitors. Mood boarding is essential to communicate all these traits to the client. Pinterest here is a great resource for inspiration. Based on the unique traits, I developed a color palette that was inspired by everything that was talked about with a client. From her personal story, her background, and brand traits. Alongside that, I provided classic and edgy color combinations that she can apply to the brand when it is delivered.
Concept Development and Presentation
From there, two concepts were developed and presented to the client, I suggest presenting between one and two concepts. That way, there’s time to focus on the quality of the concepts. And if the right questions were asked on the initial interview, we then have a specific direction to run toward. Keep in mind that two different concepts mean two very different ideas, the way they look and the way they feel. Explaining the concepts properly and with the right words is also important. Keeping in mind that most times our clients don’t have the same design knowledge that we have. It is important to explain the concepts with depth, explaining design choices we have made. Color theory, so everything that entails that concept, and at this point, the client should provide feedback and choose only one concept to move forward with.
Refinement and Brand Guidelines
We take all of that feedback from the client to the chosen concept and finesse that designing. Here you can also start creating collaterals or continue if you haven’t. Test your design in print or digital to know if, maybe the typeface is the right typeface or the lines that you’re using are too thin or too thick, or need some kind of finessing. From there, create a final presentation for the client. And once the project is approved, it is time to create the brand guideline. Creating the brand guideline is useful, so the client or business can apply your design in the future if you’re not their in-house designer. The brand guidelines include specific values for the color palette, logo margins, how to use the different logos, and typographic rules.
Famous Brand Examples
American Airlines from 1968 by famous Italian designer, Massimo Vignelli. The American Airlines brand identity has been famous for the use of Haas Helvetica. The logo is also famous for being simple, it features the modern typeface, and the words are said half in red and half in blue. The USA’s national identity. So the whole brand system was focused on function and logic over trends or emotions.
And the second example is the Olympic summer games for Munich from 1972 by Otl Aicher. The Munich 1972 brand is known amongst designers as a strong, comprehensive visual identity that is, to this day, inspiring. The challenge then, for this specific branding project, was to re-brand the image Germany had post-World War II and modernize it. Otl Aicher created a fabulous design, iconic, bold, and dramatic, without losing the German design ethos of precision. The emblem represents a crown of rays of light, the identity included strong, playful colors and flawless pictograms. A beautifully structured pictogram system that looks fresh even today, very simplistic and extremely timeless. This whole identity system is a great example of not only redefining a country, but also inspiring a whole generation of designers.
Graphic Designing Courses in Karachi Fees: Tools and Resources
Designers have different ways of working through a design project. But while these processes can be different, successful designers follow at least something similar. A solid design process can help designers deliver quality work, get the job done through organized tasks and in an efficient manner. Not only that, there are plenty of tools that can help us design better and efficiently. We will take a look at some useful tools that can help you improve your projects at every stage of the design process. Our graphic designing courses in Karachi fees are structured to be affordable while providing you access to all professional tools and resources.
What are the 7 Types of Graphic Design?
Graphic design per se is the creation of visual compositions to solve problems and communicate ideas through design elements like typography, imagery, color, and form. There’s no one recipe to do that, that’s why there are several disciplines. We can talk about marketing or advertising, packaging, and visual identity or branding. Designers make sure we’re hitting those points through the successful use of graphic design elements. Making sure that a brand looks cohesive not only in packaging, but also in communication and graphic language. Game design, motion graphics, or animation can rely on someone who has experience. In illustration, UI and UX are two disciplines that blurred their lines also, as well as web design. It is not only concerned with the visual, but also how people interact with digital product designs.
Art directors are the designers responsible for coordinating and supervising the work of designers or other creatives who are involved in a single project. For instance, if we’re talking about a magazine design, here we have photographers, editors, sometimes illustrators, and the designer who will putting everything together. The creative director’s role is usually above the art director, and they take care of all the creative operations and tends to pitch creative concepts, usually having direct communication with clients. There are many different disciplines, and most designers specialize in more than one because of the rapid advancement in technology.
Graphic Designing Courses in Karachi University: Standard Design Workflow
While there are different disciplines, many of these jobs have a similar workflow. Generally, we start with a design brief from the client or art creative director that contains the details, purpose, and goals of the project. Next up, we have the brainstorming phase, where we collect everything from the research, and we aim to solve the problem from as many angles as possible. By the end of this brainstorming phase, designers should have multiple solutions and concepts, and ideally, narrow down the solutions to a max of three concepts, ideally two, and even better if it’s just one.
Next, it is time to get your hands dirty, so to speak and prepare rough sketches or layouts to present to the client or the team. The roughness of the sketches is for you to decide, and also depends on the time that you have for the project.
The concept presentation to the client should be concise and to the point. Remember that often clients aren’t designers, so it is important to explain every concept in detail and why we have made certain decisions.
Clients will provide feedback. Ideally, this feedback will include more than I like or I don’t like, and it will be more concept driven.
The next step is to incorporate the feedback from the client to the design, polish the details, and present the final product, deliver the necessary digital files. If it needs to be sent to press, then you will need a PDF, or you will need to push live if it is a website, or sometimes both.
Online Graphic Designing Course in Pakistan: Design Software Options
In the past, poster designs were drawn by hand and hand painted, sometimes with multiple in-capacities to achieve multi-color posters with processes like lithography or chromolithography. Now design is available to the masses from the simple swipe and tap of your screen. Professional page software like the Adobe Suite contain many software for many of the design disciplines mentioned before.
Adobe Creative Suite for Professional Design
Adobe InDesign is great for publishing magazines, book designs, multi-page documents. Photoshop is good for digital painting and photography work. Lightroom is for more specialized photography work, while Illustrator is great for vector-based designs, illustrations, and logo designs. The Adobe Suite has become the industry standard these days.
Modern Collaborative Design Tools
Figma is a great collaborative web application for UX and wireframes, or interface design. Note that you can’t build apps or websites here, you can only create the prototypes. Figma lets you collaborate on libraries and templates to share with your team. Another partially free web app is Canva. This user-friendly app has been very popular amongst non-designers the last few years. You can create marketing designs like posters, ads, and social media graphics. Figma and Canva start with a free plan, building up to other subscription models.
Budget-Friendly Adobe Alternatives
If you’re looking for Adobe Illustrator alternatives, there are plenty. Affinity Designer has a one-off cost rather than monthly subscription. Other apps like Sketch, Coral draw are also options and Inkscape is a great free option. As for InDesign, other desktop publishing app that has been used more and more these days is Affinity Publisher. Their latest release is pretty close to what Adobe InDesign has to offer, and you can even import InDesign files to work there. UI and UX designers also use some of these tools like Figma Adobe XD, Workflow, and sketch. And if you’re interested in typeface design FontLab is a professional software that has been the industry standard for many, many years. FontForge is a great free option here.
Project Management Tools for Designers
When it comes to organizing projects, Trello is a great online tool that helps streamline creative processes and create a fluid collaboration between multiple designers or big teams. I personally also use Milanote, it is an awesome, easy to use tool to organize ideas and projects through visual boards, it is Pinterest for designers. Our online graphic designing course in Pakistan provides hands-on training with all these industry-standard software.
Graphic Design Courses Free with Certificate: Design Assets and Resources
Design assets have become essential for the busy designer and tight budget. Not every client can afford photography or professional licensing for typefaces. So these assets are important to achieve a high-quality design. While we offer paid programs with certification, we also share resources about graphic design courses free with certificate options available online for those starting their journey.
Graphic Designing Course in Karachi Free: Font Resources
There are plenty of free options to download fonts like DaFont and Google fonts. DaFont has a great library with plenty of fonts that suit a big range of projects. Google fonts offer amazing quality fonts for free with a wide range of open source fonts in different languages. On their website, you can also try different font combinations before you download them to see if they work for your design project. These resources are helpful whether you’re taking a graphic designing course in Karachi free or our paid professional programs.
Graphic Design Courses Fees: Color Development Tools
Finding color combinations can also be time-consuming, and there are awesome tools that can help with that process and get it shortened. Coolers is a great tool to help you get started with a color palette, you can pick, get inspiration, generate random palettes, and even go as far as checking contrast and create gradients. Another great tool is Happy Hues. If you like a color palette, but you don’t know how to apply it, this site can give you inspiration and examples as to how and where you could use the color palettes. Many designers turn to design assets from websites like Envato Elements. Explorer the fonts library and find anything from vintage fonts to futuristic fonts and even some of the best experimental fonts in the industry. When comparing graphic design courses fees, look at what practical resources and software access you get with your investment.
Graphic Designing Course in Lahore: Technology’s Impact
Will AI Replace Graphic Design?
Our main purpose as graphic designers is to communicate. Technology has made it easier to reach and spread information at a much faster rate due to the Internet. Brands have more exposure online, allowing them to have a direct relationship to consumers. Digital graphics quality improved greatly, but before would have been done with collage, today can be created by painting in Adobe Photoshop or feeding words to an AI. Nowadays, we can take amazing photographs not only with cameras, but also with our phones.
Connectivity has made it interesting for many designers to work remotely. Adobe has made it easy for freelance designers to work anywhere in the world while still collaborating on design files without being in house. When it comes to fonts, in the past we needed multiple refined files or multiple files. Now we have variable fonts, this is the latest digital type addition, where one font file contains multiple typographic styles that vary in weighed with style and size.
Technology has made the field if graphic design expand by organically creating overlapping disciplines. UI and UX wouldn’t have happened without the Internet revolution. The traditional graphic designer was known for creating packaging or ads for marketing. It now has evolved into a wide range of disciplines, all which have communication and technology as the common denominator. Our graphic designing course in Lahore covers these modern technological aspects thoroughly.
Is Graphics Design a Good Career?
Graphic design is an essential tool for business growth and it will continue to evolve as a result of advances in technology and online mediums. Graphic design has a purpose. Every design problem has a brief to work off from and a problem to solve. And that’s what makes graphic design, graphic design. Taking a proper graphic designing course helps you build the skills needed for a successful career in Pakistan’s growing design market.
Graphic Designing Course: Get Started Today
Graphic design is the creation of visual content with a communication purpose. You will learn about the different visual elements that are involved in creating a design. We looked at the basic principles of design so you can organize the limits on the page color theory and its concepts and an overview of typography, history and its classification. We also looked at the different design disciplines that exist presently and the more traditional ones. You also saw examples of the different design choices you can make based on the discipline.
To make your design process easier, we show you tools that can help you have a seamless workflow. We also show you everything from a subscription software alternatives. Mood boarding and websites to help you with color development. We took a look at how technology has evolved and affected our industry. While technology development has moved quickly, we must remind ourselves the core job of a graphic designer. It all lies in a balance between making something look visually stunning or organizing complex information that’s being delivered in a comprehensible way. At the end of the day, communicating with clarity is priority.
Looking for a graphic designing course in Pakistan? Want to know about graphic designing course fees in Pakistan? Interested in programs from Karachi or Lahore? We offer training that takes you from basics to professional level. Our courses include real projects, software training with Adobe Suite and Figma, and guidance from working designers. Whether you want to freelance or work in-house, our program prepares you for Pakistan’s design industry. Contact us to learn more about our graphic designing courses in Karachi fees and enrollment details.