Speaker 1: Welcome to the first lesson of Layout and Design. We're going to look at five elements of design. Before we get into our production cards, more advanced Photoshop lessons, After Effects lessons, Premiere Pro, text and titling lessons, it's important that we understand the basic elements of design, the art principles that govern all design. And this will impact all of our future design and video production. These are five concepts that I want you to have in your back pocket. I expect you to master them with one little mini lesson. This is to introduce you to a logo that will help you hopefully remember and visualize them. And then as we work on this project and other ones, we will continue to apply these principles, these design elements to everything we do. Before we begin though, a little introductory here. Wisdom. Lao Tse says, 30 spokes meet at the hub, but the void within them creates the essence of the wheel. Clay forms pots, but the void within creates the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors make the house, but the void within them creates the essence of the house. And this is a wonderful little piece of wisdom that can be unpacked in many different ways. But for design principle, what we want to look at is that design is about more than just the wheel or its look or its function. Most people will look and they will see just the rim, the hub, or the spokes and think that is the purpose of the wheel. But as the saying goes, the space in between is an essential part of the design, an essential part of the form, an essential part of the function, and an essential part of its overall purpose. And so when we design elements, especially with logos and text and titling, the empty spaces are as important, as vital, as the filled spaces. And we will get into that a little bit more, but keep that in the back of your mind. What is present and what is not present work together for the overall function. Alright, so now we are going to look at the five basic elements of design. Element number one is harmony. Balance and coherence in the way things are put together is our definition of harmony. And if we take a look at the classic symbol here of the yin and yang, as it is often called in western culture, this is going to be the symbol that we use to kind of represent these five elements that I want you to start to consider. So balance and coherence. We look at balance, we look at the weight of the heavy portions are equally balanced. We look at the weight of the thin portions are equally balanced. There is coherence in the way they are put together. There is harmony between the way they coexist. And this is an important thing to think about, even with a simple title on a video slide. So harmony, balance, coherence. These are some key terms that I want you to understand. Balance and coherence. That's what makes up harmony. The next one we are going to look at is contrast. Now contrast is difference and opposition. Where harmony works together, contrast doesn't necessarily fight each other or work apart, but they present a little bit of difference and opposition. So if we look at the same symbol here, the yin and yang, we see difference in color. White, black. White, black. We see opposition. There is weight here of the fat part of the element. There is weight here. They draw attention. The contrast between the black and the white help each other stand out and help highlight each other. So while these two halves of this whole work in harmony, they also have contrast that draws attention. So contrast. Next we are going to look at proportion. The balance between size and shape. This is perfectly proportioned. You have a complete round circle here. But if you were to divide it this way, you have a size that is greater in this region and smaller in this region. But when connected together we have perfect proportion that creates a balance between the size and the shape. This allows us to have a unified symbol that is perfectly proportioned, perfectly harmonized and has contrast. Next we are going to look at rhythm. Rhythm is probably the most difficult of all the design elements to grasp. Rhythm takes experience. It takes exposure. It takes studying other work, whether it be music, art, or video. But this is consistency. Consistency with movement, flow, pattern, and shape. Again, we see great examples of this symbolized. There is consistency in the flow and the pattern of this shape. As it flows through here downward, it also flows through here upward. As this pushes the weight of the object that way, this pushes the weight of the object that way. There is consistency in it. While this element is vertical, this is also in the vertical plane. So there is a rhythm to this design. A rhythm that creates that flow. Now not everything needs to be exactly symmetrical like this. Symmetrical means that we have the exact amount of space here, here, here, and here. You can have things that are asymmetrical but still have a rhythm or a flow. This is really important when we are looking at text entitling within a slide or in a video. How does the eye flow through it? How does the eye read it? If we look at this slide for example, there is element here, there is element here, there is element here. All specifically placed color changes to move you through the titles with a sense of rhythm and a sense of flow. Unity. It all comes together for the same purpose. This is really important, especially when choosing fonts. A lot of people will pick a font here, a different font here, a different font here, and there will be no unity for them. There is no purpose behind them. Why is this bold down here? Why is this black? Why is this red? All of this is designed with purpose. This component here is the same from slide to slide, as is this component and this component. The fonts don't change from slide to slide. The colors of where the elements change. The definitions have all been in red. The subject matter have all been in black. This kind of unity is very important, especially with text entitling and with logos. If we look at the symbol here, again we see perfect unity. That is part of what this represents. Unity between the black and the white. The weight of the objects, the location, the proportion, all come together for purpose. These are all abstract concepts as we look at these, but abstract concepts that with time will start to make sense as long as you keep them present in your thought with design. So just to review, harmony, balance and coherence in the way things are put together. We see harmony between the two halves that make up the yin and the yang working together. Contrast, the difference and opposition for separation and attention. We see difference in the symbol with color and with weight. Proportion, the balance between size and shape. Creating proportions that are correct with what draws the eye towards the elements. Rhythm, again that consistency, that movement, that flow in pattern and shape. This is a little bit more abstract and this is the one I'm going to tell you guys is going to be governed more by feel and taste probably than by quantifiable or measurable items as the others are. And then finally unity. Are all the things on our page, on our screen, on our slide, are they working together for the same purpose or are they fighting each other? This is very important when you think about backgrounds and foregrounds with text and symbols as we move forward into creating our production cards. Are all these elements working together or do they make the viewer fight for attention? If you can balance all of these, harmony, contrast, proportion, rhythm and unity in your design, your text, your titling, your logos, your production cards and that whole element of your video making will move from the amateur level towards the professional level which is the goal. Alright, that has been the elements of design, the five basic principles. This video is designed for you to come back to it throughout this lesson while working on the production cards, actually throughout the year. This is going to be a tool that will be available in our time capsule that I would like you to revisit from time to time. Let me give you a few bonus slides here to add a few things that we really need to focus on moving forward. Alright, bonus material. We have space issues and this is not an issue of personal space but an issue of space on the page. We want to talk about three types of space and this is pulled from graphic designs, pulled from print design but all these elements also transfer over to video especially when we're talking about production cards, text and titling. Black space. This black space term refers to photos, main images, logos. In text it would be headlines, illustrations, clip art, large boxes, pull quotes. In video, it's your main titles, it's your main logo, it's your main image. We refer to that as black space. Then gray space refers to body text, to details, to information you break out that way. Gray space in video can also be background elements. If you have a textured background behind your text. And then white space is exactly what it says, the empty space and probably the most important and overlooked of the three types of spaces. So often beginners in design feel the need to just fill the entire space and that is too much. The viewer needs time to process and we've talked about before, let's try to keep things to five to seven words max, three to five lines max per title in video because we don't want to overwhelm the viewer. We have to allow enough white space not only for them to let their eyes drop and land on highlighted red material or the black, the gray, the white contrast, but also to give them room to breathe and room to process. Okay, next fonts. We've talked about this a little bit. I want to remind you there's two types of fonts. Serif fonts have these fancy little decorations on them here at the ends. If you look at Sans Serif, they don't. They're without style on the ends. This is for different types of text. Now in newsprint, this is going to be your body text and this is going to be your headlines. For video, we want to stick with this as much as we can for our text and titling for our main purposes. Serif fonts become difficult to read, especially as you see here in a small font where it's a little bit easier to read these in a smaller font. So you want to balance this. Use this typically for your titles, your bullet points, your main pieces of information, and then use this sparingly for contrast with more detailed information. But again, make sure your font size is enough. Do the ten foot rule. We talked about the ten foot rule throughout. Put it on your computer screen, stand ten feet away, look at it. Is it easy to view? Is it easy to process? You'll find often if this is not working, a move to a Sans Serif font, your Verdanas, your Arials, your Helveticas will work. And finally, shapes. A page should follow geometric shapes. So should a text or title card. Now you guys have all learned about the rule of thirds. We break any title screen or any visual screen into thirds. We talk about placing titles in our lower thirds or we talk about placing our subject at an eyeline. But this goes as well for laying out text and titling. Text and titling, it's very important that you also think about how you use shapes on your page. For example, if we look at this page, let me just remove some of the highlight here. If we look at this page, it's laid out with a geometric shape to it. We have our main title here, we have a subtitle here, we have a visual element here, we have title, text. Now if you draw lines between these main components, you're going to see that these main components shape in a triangle. Typical pages, again, you want to weight an object. Maybe you have a symbol here, maybe you have a title here. Again, this shape forms a triangle. One of the most basic shapes to use, and again, utilizing that white space. So these last three tips are just kind of to help you focus. Come back to these, but remember these design elements are what we're going to try to apply to our logo. This has been the elements of design, and now you're going to move forward into looking specifically how to apply them by using Photoshop to build a production logo for your production card.