DesignBytes

DesignBytes are easy-to-digest design lessons prepared + served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

A bento box is the complete package! 

What makes this compact Japanese meal a feast of epic proportions is the variety of tastes, textures and food groups it’s composed of. Each item, whether it’s meat, rice or vegetable, is a delight even as standalone dishes.

Design Speak: In this digital age, video content is the most powerful business asset to grow your  brand and drive sales. However, it can be an intimidatingly pricy and time-consuming undertaking whether you need animations, aerial drone footage, or testimonials. But there are so many creative ways you can repurpose videos into smaller, bite-sized content across multiple platforms to get the biggest bang for your buck. Break it down into a mini-campaign for Instagram, post quick clips on Twitter, develop video ads for retargeting on Facebook, use the illustrations to create infographics for LinkedIn…the possibilities are endless. — Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by @cosmicdesigners

[designbytesblog]

In the case of chocolate chip cookies, more is always better because what’s a chocolate chip cookie without the chips? Design Speak: In Photoshop, the Clone Tool allows you to copy one area of an image onto another area. Usually it’s used to remove unwanted elements in an image — like covering a blemish — but you can also copy a group of pixels and paste them over another group of pixels. The result is that the retouched area blends in seamlessly with the rest of the image. – Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by @cosmicdesigners ☕️@starbucks

[designbytesblog]

What season is it? Well, yes, it’s Fall but it’s also the season for all things Pumpkin Spice! It’s a flavour that you either love or hate but the more difficult decision is whether to get it with or without whip cream. Luckily, the mask function in Photoshop allows you to have it both ways. Mask in or out, the good, the bad – and the spice…y. . Design Speak: The Mask is a layer in photoshop that allows the designer to hide or reveal parts of a layer without changing the contents of the layer. So if you’re feeling a bit indecisive about whether you want it with whip or without, remember – ’tis the season for oversized, cozy sweaters..😉 . – Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by @cosmicdesigners ☕️@starbucks

[designbytesblog]

Do you have a hard time keep serif and san serif fonts straight in your head? Well, the proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the waffle.⁣⠀

Design Speak:⠀ Serif fonts are distinguished by extra "tails" or strokes on the letters that helps make it more readable, specifically for print. Sans (meaning "without" in French) is minus the additional strokes which gives it a cleaner, more modern and legible appearance. 

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

We’re clinging to the last days of summer like 😫😫😫 Go grab some ice cream that looks as look as it tastes while it’s still seasonally appropriate.

Design Speak:

Image resolution can be identified by width and height as well as by pixel amount. It’s directly correlated to file size meaning the more pixels there are, the higher the resolution therefore the file size is larger and the image is sharper (and more delicious-looking) 🍦🍦🍦🍦

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Design is a collaborative effort between the designer and client and a project can go through multiple iterations before it's finished. From the initial blossoming of an idea, the piece grows through many stages to final touches before it's ready to be consumed by the masses 🌸🍓🍫

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Celebrate 2017 by cheers-ing with some bubbly, no matter the glass shape. Champagne is champagne!

Design Speak:

When a design of a website is responsive, it refers to the flexibility of the design. The content – copy, images, design elements – is composed into a layout that adjusts to fit the platform it’s viewed on in terms of screen size, orientation, user behaviour, etc…

Whether you’re viewing the site on your phone or on a desktop computer, the content remains the same but is just arranges differently. It’s acts like liquid, fitting to the shape it’s put in, whether it’s in a long, elegant champagne flute or a short, wide whisky tumbler.

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

This Halloween we are resurrecting DesignBytes and what better lesson to do it with than explaining what DIE cuts are.

Design Speak:

Imagine that you are prepping your pumpkin to be transformed into the best jack-o’-lantern in the neighbourhood. You wouldn’t just go cutting freestyle for fear of marring your gourd so you mark where you plan on cutting. This is indicated by a dieline. After a piece has been printed, the process of cutting out the shapes using dies is called die cutting. A die cut element calls attention to the 3D nature of your material, be it paper or a pumpkin!  

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Typographer Ryan Gosling: "Hey Girl, this Valentine's Day I'm kerning "U" + "I" together. #4ever. 

Design Speak: Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters to create a visually pleasing result. 

Tag your designer significant other to wish them a Happy Valentine's Day! 😘😍😻😽 

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Rags, widows, + orphans sound more like a festive Dickens' novel than typography jargon so it makes it the perfect holiday DesignByte! These terms have to do with ensuring there are no weird gaps in text that will distract the eye while reading. 

Rag refers to the irregular vertical margin of a block of type. It's better for the rag to go in + out in small increments so the empty space doesn't create shapes. 

A widow is a short line or one word, at the end of a paragraph. 

An orphan (like Oliver Twist) is a short line or one word at the beginning of a page. 

Happy Holidays from Cosmic Design!

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Have you ever sent your designer files through cloud-based file transfer services (think WeTransfer)? Those files have a shelf life + expire (like summer) after a certain amount of time. Just as if you left a popsicle out + it melted into a messy, sticky puddle. 

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Here's a history lesson for you: Canada Day is celebrating the coming together of 3 colonies to make our great country! Honour the day off by indulging in a very Canadian snack, poutine! Poutine is the coming together of delicious foods (fries, gravy, + cheese curds).

Design Speak: Packaged files is a command in Adobe InDesign that collects the elements that make up the layered file (such as fonts, links, + images) so it can be passed off to another designer who needs to be able to adjust the content. 

What makes poutine, poutine is combining fries with . Poutine is like a packaged file. Without gravy + cheese curds (+ bacon if you're truly proud to be Canadian!) you're just eating fries. Not as delicious.

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

For National Donut Day, we decided to communicate the design process using Homer Simpson’s favourite food! At Cosmic, we approach every problem strategically, considering all the potential possibilities and pushing the limits of our imaginations. This allows us to develop innovative and elegant solutions with a defined objective. This is the basic process we follow:

1) Explore the problem through research, determine objectives, limitations, etc…

2) Brainstorm: Sketch it out! Start on the paper first and doodle out your ideas.

3) Consider potential possibilities and variations of ideas before bringing it to the computer. More sprinkles? What kind of frosting? What kind of cake??

There are a lot of painstaking steps in the creative process before landing on the perfect solution.

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Don’t take chances with your knowledge about colour theory and play the Wheel of Colour! The colour wheel creates a “logical structure” to understand how it is used and the context.

Design Speak: Primary Colours: Red , yellow + blue These are colours that cannot be created by the mixing of other pigments but all the other colours are derived from these.

Secondary Colours: Green, orange + purple The colours that are created by mixing the primary colours

Complementary Colours are colours directly opposite from each other on the colour wheel. Im combination, they create the most contract as well as stability.

Triadic Colours are evenly spaced apart on the colour wheel. The result is a very vibrant palette so one should be dominant while the other 2 hues be used as accent.

Warm Colours are made with orange, yellow and red. They appear to come closer or advance

Cool Colours are made with blue, green and purple. They appear to recede and create space.

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

How do you like your Cadbury’s Chocolate Mini Eggs to align (other than in your belly)? Right? Left? Center Justified? Alignment is used in design to organize elements which will make the design more visually appealing. 

Design Speak: Left Adjusted Text is text that is aligned along the left margin.

Right Adjusted Text is text that is aligned along the right margin.

Centered Text is aligned neither to the left nor right margin; there is an even gap on each side of each line.

Justified text is spaced so the left and right sides of the text block both have a straight edge.

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

Designers United Against Crust! Here are pizza specs for crust-haters. Mamma’s is Cosmic’s pizza joint of choice!

Design Speak: Bleed is the excess image area that must pass the trim dimensions to avoid having the image border accidentally print (a quarter inch is fairly standard).

Trim is the final size of a printed page after excess edges have been cut off.

Live Area is where your main typographic elements should be without worrying about their being cut off or cut off from view. This area ensures that your typography and main graphics will be seen.

(Definitions via about tech)

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.

[designbytesblog]

“Make it POP!” If everything POPS, nothing does!

Design Speak: Emphasis creates a focal point in a design; it is how we bring attention to what is most important. Emphasis is what catches the eye and makes the viewer stop and look at the image. Without emphasis, without getting the viewer to look at the image, communication cannot occur.

An important thing to remember about emphasis is that if everything is emphasized (all text is large and bold, all images are animated or flashing, everything is in bright colors) then nothing will stand out, nothing will be emphasized, nothing will grab the viewer’s attention.

(Definition via Donna Tersiisky)

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Easy-to-digest design lessons prepared & served by Cosmic Design.