Fast access, global demand, short deadlines and quick turnaround have made it all too easy to stray away from the basics of design. If you had a professor in college who taught you design fundamentals, the basics should be engrained in you. If you are self-taught, you may have a book on your desk that you refer to on a daily basis. For the masses, the internet is both a valuable resource, and possibly the source of a design epidemic.
People have flooded the internet looking for design content, and while you might not need to learn the basics before attempting a stellar gradient in Photoshop, there will come a point where this style is left behind and a new style reaches popularity. In history, this lesson has repeated itself with movements like ‘Bauhaus‘ and ‘Swiss Modernism‘ which will soon label our current trends as part of design history.
The fact is, the fundamentals of design will never change:
- balance
- contrast
- emphasis and subordination
- directional forces
- proportion
- scale
- repitition and rythmn
- unity within variety
They are the glue that holds the design industry together and to reach success, we need to learn these from the very beginning.