I was reminded this week while teaching an art therapy class that the principles of design are the same for fine arts and graphic design. We were making clocks by building up paper collages over Nordstrom shoe boxes with clock motors attached to the box tops.
As source material for the collages, my fiancee had collected and silhouetted photos of the autistic members, and had also collected large sepia images from an oversized Italian fashion magazine as well as color photos and drawings from an advertising promotion print book.
What started as a fine arts project began to gradually expand into a graphic design project, as the autistic members and their parents and aides wrapped the images around the boxes, in various sizes, at various angles, and with various photo croppings. Some images were tightly cropped, with parts of models’ faces wrapped around the box corners or cut off entirely. In some cases the members even cut out words from the magazines and pasted them down, or glued Scrabble letters onto the clock shoe-boxes to spell words.
I observed, and I thought, and then I explained the following principles to help them with their artwork:.
Photo Cropping
Images can have a lot of space around the subject matter (such as a person’s face), or they can be “severely” cropped. That is, you can focus intently on one aspect of the face, such as the eyes, by cropping away everything else.
This concept is immediately transferable to publication design as well. (In your own work, whether you’re designing a brochure, logo, or print book cover, try different approaches to photos. Decide what you want the image to “say.” What’s the message you want to convey, and how can you most effectively make this statement by highlighting certain elements of the photo? If you’re doing this on a computer with an image editing application and a page design program, your ability to play with different approaches is enhanced (compared to my fiancee’s and my students’ approach with scissors and glue).
Read more at https://www.printindustry.com/blog/2020/03/custom-printing-thoughts-on-designing-with-photos/
