Michael Risk

Basic Elements of Graphic Design

Art Director, Oozle Media

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Alright, Chris, thank you so much.

Anyone at Oozle, even Chris, will tell you I am very passionate about graphic design and the impact it has in the digital marketing sphere.

Graphic design is absolutely essential, because it assists marketers in developing brand awareness and influence in the decision-making process of your customers. In one way or another, you need to visually communicate your brand to your target prospects.

By using graphic design in social media, you’re able to establish a consistent brand footprint across all platforms. Branding your own graphics lets your audience become more interested in your business, and can lead to them becoming your customers or matriculated students. So this afternoon, I want to talk with you about basic elements of graphic design for social media.

So with the advancement of products like Canva that allow businesses to design their own marketing creative, I want to take the time to share with you a few basic design principles that can help you easily begin to get into the mindset of a designer. This will help you not only be able to tackle your own designs, but also help you to communicate better with your design team, or your marketing agency’s design team.

What Is Graphic Design?

So, what is graphic design? Graphic design is defined as the art and profession of combining images, text, graphics, and ideas to create works that capture a viewer’s attention to communicate a specific message. However, creating beautiful design is about more than inspiration, or even a great idea, it’s about understanding the fundamentals of the subject.

Rules were made to be broken, of course, but you have to know what they are first.

So, the elements of design are best understood as being the building blocks of any project. Even the most complex graphic design project can be broken down into fundamental elements like lines, shapes, and fonts, and by having a strong knowledge of these principles, your designs will not only look better, but will offer a better user experience.

And there are a handful of basic design elements and principles that every designer should know before beginning any project, and today, I’m going to take you through what I feel are the most important, to help you understand the fundamentals of graphic design for social media.

Imagery

So, the first and most important element in any design is imagery. The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” continues to hold true in the digital age. Across online and social media platforms, images have been proven to boost performance and engagement.

So, why are images so important to your design and marketing creative? Well, social media is a crowded space, and accompanying your posts and content with images is a great way to grab attention. In fact, you are 10 times more likely to get engagement.

When you post varying images and graphics often and stay consistent with your posting schedule, you avoid having social media feeds that feel same old, same old. You won’t run the risk of losing your audience due to boredom and repetition, and gathering followers is the first step in nurturing those future students.

If you pair a relevant image with your material, people will remember your information longer and recall it faster. This makes images the ideal way to communicate in today’s short-attention world. And when you design and post for a variety of platforms, you want to be sure to keep your visual identity consistent. When people see similar types of images, colors, and patterns on Pinterest like they do on Facebook or Instagram, they’ll associate those images with your brand.

Video

So let’s talk about video. Over the last two years, we’ve seen an incredible increase in video content. YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, have progressively pivoted towards video as a format of choice, while the rapid rise of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels have shown just how persuasive and addictive video can be.

So if you take a look at any social media platform, then chances are, you’ll have seen video content within the first 10 seconds.

This is because video content typically performs best with most algorithms, based on the fact it captures a viewer’s attention for longer, and the longer a viewer engages with a piece of content, the more likely an algorithm will boost that content to a wider audience. This explains why videos generate more engagement than any other content.

Video content is unique in that not only does it tell your brand’s story, but it shows it.

Creating fun, lively video content will better show the personality of your brand, and is likely to be viewed by the 55% of people watching videos online every day. And most importantly, people want to see more video from you to learn more about your business.

So, when thinking about what imagery and video to use in your designs, you need to focus on grabbing your audience’s attention.

Scrolling past any content is extremely simple, so creating multimedia and graphic design that stands out and stops the scroll is paramount. If there’s anything you take away from me today, it’s this:

The longer someone stays on your post and engages with your brand, the more likely they will be to go on the journey to becoming your customer or your student.

You need to have engaging creative that stops the scroll.

Customers

Some things to consider when you’re designing creative for your customers. Which age ranges and ethnic groups are your most avid viewers? Who do you want to attract? Who are you currently attracting? Understanding who you are marketing to can drastically change your message and design.

Do you want your design to be perceived as positive, aggressive, or thought-provoking? Do you want your viewers to feel happy, relaxed, pumped, or uplifted? Images heavily liked on Facebook tended to display four qualities:

• Brightness
• Clarity
• Liveliness
• Ingenuity

Many stock libraries such as Shutterstock, Unsplash, and Pexels allow you to search their collections using certain keywords or phrases, and this will help you to find the perfect image for your design.

So, if you take a look at this statistic here, brand images get better engagement when they show a person or part of a person, typically a hand interacting with an object. The suggestion behind the research is consumers are better able to imagine themselves interacting with the product when they see a part of someone else physically interacting with it.

That is why in our industry, hair and beauty models are so impactful, as well as photos and video of your students or your staff performing services in the chair.

Cropping

So, part of working with an image inside a design layout is cropping. Cropping is the removal of unwanted outer areas from an image or video. Cropping usually consists of the removal of some of the peripheral areas of an image to remove unwanted elements from the picture.

This helps to improve its framing, create greater emphasis, and to change or adjust the shape of your layout. It is also used to accentuate or isolate the subject matter from its background.

Clever and deliberate cropping of images, shapes, form, and letter form can make a design more visually dominating, as we can see in this example.

Line and Shape

So far, we’ve talked a lot about imagery and video, and how important it is to incorporate those assets into your designs, so for the rest of our time today, I want to talk briefly about a few elements and principles you’ll need to think about also incorporating into your designs, and the two most fundamental elements of design are line and shape.

Lines

Lines are used as roadmaps to direct the viewer’s eye movements. They can exist on their own, or be employed to create texture and movement to connect information, to create space and mood. Lines can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal, circular, patterned, freeform, or solid.

Because even simple lines are able to convey so much, designers should always carefully consider how and when to use them to provide the most impact. So if we look at this image, we used line to create movement, and an emotional sense of accomplishment in knowing that they did.

Shapes

So, shapes help the designer to add interest or organize elements of design. They’re not strictly ornamental either, as shapes can have symbolic meanings, invoke feelings, or be used to direct the eye to the most important information, and there are three basic types of shapes.

1. Geometric shapes are your basic squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, etc.
2. Organic shapes have flowing lines, and are also called natural shapes. They resemble objects found in nature, such as a pond, an apple, or a leaf.
3. Abstract shapes are things like letters, icons, or symbols that can help convey a message.

The right lines and shapes in a design can convey movement and emotion, tying together your composition and making it look polished and professional.

Color

So, color. Color plays one of the biggest roles in graphic design. It can give emphasis, it can be used as a mechanism of organization, it can create impact and create a specific look and feel in a piece of graphic design work.

The modern color wheel consists of primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors, and these can be split into warm and cool colors. Complementary colors appear directly opposite each other on the color wheel, so for example, violet and yellow are considered to be complementary colors.

If you guys have seen the screen that we put up in the background when we’re breaking, you can see that the background is primarily violet, and some of the typefaces that we use, one of the colors is yellow. This complementary color, and the opposing colors, create maximum contrast and maximum stability.

Color can also be mixed in varying ratios to create different shades, tints, and tones. A lot of brands will do this, a brand might have just one singular color as their primary color, but they might introduce different shades and tints and tones of that color to create their entire brand color palette.

Color can also tap into emotions that can help your design in achieving its desired response. So if you look at this photo here, you can see that the primary colors, like violet, can create an elegant or complex or smooth emotion, as well as the pinks can create power, action, or even glamor emotions. Graphic design is about more than just choosing a few colors that look pleasant together.

Understanding the psychology of color and knowing how to use it strategically is one of the basic fundamentals of graphic design.

Typography

So with typography, graphic designers use typography to adjust the text within the design. This helps in creating content with a purpose. The planned use of typefaces allows the designer to make creative look aesthetic and pleasing.

Your first concern is choosing a font that matches the message or purpose of your design. Before you ever start browsing through fonts that are available, it would be a good idea to brainstorm some of the qualities or characteristics that you want your design to communicate, and how your typeface selection will enhance your visual message.

A lot of times in a brand, you might have a very specific typeface that you’re using, so you want to think about how that typeface can interact and engage with your other designs, and how that message can be better heard or seen.

Using two to three fonts will keep your design clean and professional, so for example, one for the title and one for the body of your message. And using only one font is an option, as there are a number of fonts that come with various weights to help you with your visual hierarchy, using bold for the most important information, and light or regular weights for the secondary information.

So, if the characteristics the font is communicating don’t match the message of your overall design, then there will be a visual disconnect for the viewers or users of your design. If you find yourself getting off-track, just ask yourself this one question: Does this font support the qualities of the brand, or complement the purpose of my design? The most effective font choices do just that.

And finally, after gathering all of your different creative assets and pairing all of these concepts together, we get the final composition. Train your eye to see how everything fits together. Take into consideration spacing and scale. Your various assets should relate to each other as one cohesive image and message.

Composition

Some other elements to consider in your final composition. Emphasis. Emphasis is the focal point of your artwork you create. In every work of graphic design, you must make the viewer focus their attention on a specific part of the artwork. It could be text, an object, or an image.

Balance in design covers how the visual weight of elements are balanced with each other within the design to create cohesiveness, completion, and satisfaction.

And finally, unity and harmony, which speaks to the intangible feeling that all design elements belong together, creating a sense of completeness. I hear this a lot from clients, “I’ll know it when I see it.” That’s kind of a frustrating response for a designer, but it has its purpose.

There’s just a feeling that you get when you look at a design, it works, everything flows together perfectly. When a design has harmony, the design elements are working in unity. The goal of any design is to communicate something, so without strong unity, its communication breaks down, and the design fails.

Okay, so thank you so much for taking the time to be here this afternoon. We’ve just scratched the surface here today, but I hope you have begun to get a better understanding of how utilizing these different elements of design in any form or layout that requires text, images, and color can help you to create something unique and on-brand for your social media marketing.

There are many online and offline tools to help you create basic design, and I hope you take whatever you learned today and apply it when working on designs for your brand.

If you would like to work with the design professionals at Oozle Media, I hope you’ll contact us in the future. We would be happy to discuss with you how we can elevate your brand and digital marketing with professional graphic design and multimedia design. All right, Chris, that’s my time.

Chris:

Hey. Dude, well done, just the comments are coming in on how awesome that was, and somebody said it was by far one of their favorite sessions, and so, nice job. Everybody in the comments, please thank Michael for sharing that awesome presentation, so much good info. I mean, just such good info, I mean, you can see good graphic design out there, and certainly you can see graphic design that needs this presentation.

Michael Risk:

Yeah, I mean, even the… I mean, graphic design is everywhere, it’s everywhere, and once you turn it on, you won’t be able to turn it off, you see it in just every little thing that you look at it, it’s crazy.

Chris:

Yeah. Look at this comment, “Very good, I’m a numbers guy, but loved this.” Cool, well thank you so much Michael, we appreciate it so much.