Design Elements: Understanding the rules and knowing when to break them

This updated version of Rockport’s bestselling Design Elements offers expanded and updated content in a new, cleaner format for easier navigation. Author Timothy Samara has added more than 50 new diagrams and more than 100 new images of real-world projects with an increased emphasis on web and environmental design projects. The 20 Rules for Good Design has been revisited and expanded to 25 Rules. The book covers all the design fundamentals from working with grids, color application, typography, imagery and how to put it all together.

Expansion and new material includes:

• Composition/layout, visual hierarchy,
• Form and composition in relation to concepts and meaning
• Color psychology and narrative
• Color coding
• Reference palettes for time periods, cultures, and businesses
• Special color and printing techniques-Combining type styles, editorial text setting issues, plus
• Web-related type style and hierarchy issues
• Strategies for using photography; design drawing; medium and meaning; pictorial and non-pictorial-image-making options; semiotics, symbolic and metaphorical image use; type as image
• Making type and imagery work better together
• Finding flexibility in design systems
• The design process, from creative concept development and practical work-flow standpoints…
• Plus a complete project case study with major decision-moments keyed to respective sections!

Being a creative designer is often about coming up with unique design solutions. Unfortunately, when the basic rules of design are ignored in an effort to be distinctive, design becomes useless. In language, a departure from the rules is only appreciated as great literature if recognition of the rules underlies the text. Graphic design is a "visual language," and brilliance is recognized in designers whose work seems to break all the rules, yet communicates its messages clearly.