From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

Less is more: Book covers

From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

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Less is more: Book covers

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- I was asked by a viewer recently how to design things that print with less ink and I'm like, oh my goodness, what a cool topic. Yeah, ink is expensive and we want to minimize our use of it, but what got me excited was that when you minimalize your design you almost always improve it. Even when you're not designing for paper your work will still improve. So yeah, let's do this. And I'd like to start here. This is a book cover, the kind you'd print on your desktop, has a little white border. And I want to emphasize that this doesn't have to be a book, it can be anything, poster, flyer, brochure, mobile, whatever, use your imagination. Wall-to-wall ink coverage and a design of rectangles. The rectangular page, the photo frames, windows, the horizontal bars top and bottom, all that, very mechanical, very unyoga-like actually. And it will use a lot of ink. There are two basic ways to use less ink. If we're starting here one is to work in a smaller area, the other is to use lighter images, or both. Both of which means we'll need to learn how to use white space, which I find super exciting, because there are so many ways and they're not well understood. So let's start over right here. This is one of the three photos. It's the only one we'll need and it's lovely. Predominately white, sand, sea, sky, almost an ombre effect, very soft, neutral. Rectangles though, even light ones, create a sense of confinement. Straight lines, corners, hard edges, the picture stops. This isn't intentional, it just happens. But we could open it up like this. It's a soft vignette applied in Photoshop. And I love this. What I love is that it's so life-like. It's how we see. We're looking at her and the background fades away just like it would in our peripheral vision. Look again at the difference. Before, after. It's organic, it's curvy, silhouettes will give you that, it's airy, bring the title back in. Typeface is called Diavlo, D-I-A-V-L-O. Same color as before, but you don't want it in a line at the top like a normal title. This is still rectangle thinking. Gets mechanical. You want to soften it, go with the flow, more like this. Tight line spacing, not quite centered. The idea is to get the letters interacting and creating their own flow, like you see here in the highlight. It's an organic process, every setting is different, and it's not always successful, but it worked here. Then put it on the page. A couple things. One, the dark color is interacting with her pose. You can see that both elements have a concave shape right here, so it feels a bit like they're repelling each other. I think better would be to close that gap, which puts the title here. This feels more natural and it could work, but I'd like to suggest what I think is better and that's to return the headline to here and soften it with a very light color. This is a faint sage green. What happens is the color disconnects the title from her pose. They no longer interact. It's soft enough now that the title becomes part of the air and the ocean. And the subhead, it's centered, which keeps it simple, just a line, super light typeface. It's called Fira Sans Hair. Easy to read, but barely there. It too becomes part of the atmosphere. Then the byline above the title. I had three things in mind for this. One was to keep it quiet, which is why it's small, but give it prominence, so it's in Diavlo, it has the top hierarchical position, and it's also in a contrasting color. So it's a spot highlight, a tiny one. And we're done. I like this a lot. It's soft, it's pretty, it's inviting, it's especially nice in open space like this. Last step is to confine it to the cover and center the publisher's imprint at the bottom. It's beautiful. Here it is with the before. Same copy, very different effect. So there you go. Lovely mood, a lot of air and ambiance, and all for a fraction of the ink. We worked in a smaller space and we used lighter images and that's your design for today, see you next time.

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