Clean Up Your Mess - A Guide to Visual Design for Everybody

Excellent site. While professional designers have invaluable skills that are honed over years of experience, good design is something everyone can learn the basics of.<p>I can't agree enough with the recommendation the book "The Non-Designers Design Book." It's been around in various editions for over fifteen years, and has been on more designers, coders, and IAs bookshelves than I can count.<p>I'd like to share one more design "secret" that every graphic designer knows, and everyone can start using in a matter of minutes: The Grid.<p>Most designers work with an invisible grid that all of their elements live within, or sometimes break out of. It can be any size and ratio you want to make it. If you begin with a grid system, you'll be able to get as creative as you want with your layout, and things will fit together better and just "feel right" when you're done.<p>The best book I've found about grids is <i>The Designer and the Grid</i> <a href="http://amzn.to/lYAcyQ" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/lYAcyQ</a><p>You can also go to <a href="http://www.thegridsystem.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thegridsystem.org/</a> which actually lives up to its subtitle of "The ultimate resourcein grid systems."

One thing I noticed when looking at the two fliers and hadn't considered before, but which didn't seem to be spelled out in the article is that design for fliers is in some ways fundamentally different from design for web pages.<p>We're only ever seeing web pages from one distance, but a flier has to first call attention from a distance and then when someone comes close give the information needed for them to do something about it.<p>The original version, when seen from a distance, could easily be mistaken for a demonstration or a movie or such, since only the picture and title are in very large and distinct fonts. The new version, by contrast, has "Beginner Class", "Regular Classes", and "Come Visit" popping out making it clear to someone walking by that the cool stuff in the picture is something you can learn rather than just see.<p>And once the attention of the potential customer has been caught and they stop, then they can read the fine details.

One note for designers about color blindness - the "strong contrast" green dots (with one red one) example has essentially no contrast for those of us (~1 in 10 males) who are red-green color blind. All the dots appeared the same color until I saw the text which suggested one of them was different. Yellows and blues are safer color combinations to use if you are looking for contrast.

Did anyone else find the Aikido flyer on the left the most readable? The version on the right might be 'neater' but I was able to absorb the information from the left version more easily.

Nice one. Agree when 100% with the title. There is something for everyone in this one. I absolutely loved the part about elimination. I am not a designer myself(that means I can't design from scratch), but when I design something I take couple of example and start eliminating stuff until I reach a point where all non-important or less important bit have been removed. My philosophy in design is -<p>If it is not/less important, it probably should not be in there.

This looks very similar to a good part of "The Non-Designer's Design Book" in both structure and content. Cool that it's free. Great book.

The github repo is available to anyone interested: <a href="https://github.com/flyingmachine/clean-up-your-mess" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flyingmachine/clean-up-your-mess</a>

Design is subjective. To say something is clean vs messy is to not understand that. To create effective design is to use the elements and principles of design effectively. Clean is not an element nor a principle, it should be the end product of something well designed. "a guide to visual design" IMO should consist of explaining the elements and principles of design in a way that non-visual thinkers would understand. I highly recommend reading, "Point and Line to Plane" and/or "Art and Visual Perception" if you have any interest in design, they are great text's that explain the underlying psychology of visual perception. One is written in "Whacked out art speak" and one in "laymen's terms". Ironically the harder to read of the two is 2/3 smaller in size.

Am I the only one that hates when people keep referring to a design as being clean? That is quite possibly the least descriptive feedback anyone can give me on my designs.<p>This explains exactly where I'm coming from: <a href="http://52weeksofux.com/post/4046226488/why-clean-isnt-such-a-dirty-word-for-designers" rel="nofollow">http://52weeksofux.com/post/4046226488/why-clean-isnt-such-a...</a>

"If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry." A very nice introduction!<p>Thanks a lot. Brief, to the point, good examples to supplement the text, with pointers for further reference to good books as well. Love it.

On the "after" flyer, you might move "experience" up to the preceding line, and, perhaps, indent the second line of it. Reason being: As it is, you're separating the key data bit (no) from the actual subject/noun (experience). Someone scanning it might take "experience necessary" out of context, and get the wrong meaning from it.

Wow. Thank you. I'm still reading but so far you've increased my visual IQ by 1000%.

Yes, I feel like strangling anyone who center-aligns a mass of text.

This is a great article covering the same essence of visual design covered by many books. After understanding these principles you should be competent to do basic layouts. I find many designers do a worse job of internalizing these concepts than your average engineer would if they only took the time to try. Engineers are good at extrapolating from principles. Design is no different.