Adobe Photoshop: Graphic Design Fundamentals

The Inspiration

The almost impossibly charming M.C. Escher-inspired Monument Valley game has served for me as a paragon of aesthetic appeal from the moment it finished installing on my home screen. With rich color palettes and pleasantly sharp geometric components, the visual element of the game alone engages the player.

So who better to learn visual design principles from than ustwo, creators of Monument Valley and authors of “Pixel Perfect Precision“, a handbook on contemporary digital design principles, practices, and tools? While sharing strategies for designing at the micro-level (targeting text alignment, border radii, and object spacing among other details), ustwo also offers a big-picture perspective, teaching the novice designer best-practice strategies for accessibility, version control, and organization of assets.

With a basic grasp on the foundations of visual design, I transitioned back to a more modern approach and toolkit. Using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I compiled a collage of images that characterize my travels, my seemingly never-ending tinkering with household projects, and the quotidien moments of pleasure that brighten everyday life.

One personal standard towards which I strive is minimalism as a physical and mental state, so I attempted to convey that quality through the use of white space in the collage. Building on that foundation, I hoped to create flows of color that lead the eye across the canvas:

• Red and yellow, which move diagonally from the crawfish in the top left corner through the red of my husband’s shirt in the bottom center.
• Bright green, which flows across the top third of the collage
• Blues and whites in the sky, snow, and coat on the right.
• Stratified layers of white and brown, from the painted wall, to the bathtub, to the sedimentary rock of the Grand Canyon.

With my final creation I felt an homage to the Bauhaus giants was in order. Wanting to experiment with a more freeform approach using Photoshop’s wide kit of brush types, I took inspiration again from Kandinsky’s work in form and color. I especially liked the crosshatched lines and color overlays in his 1923 work “Circles in a Circle” (right).

Using a textured layer with reduced opacity to give the effect of an ink wash over the canvas, I attempted to “paint” using the brushes at my disposal.

As the Bauhaus artists worked to fuse art, craft, and engineering into an elevated union of form and function, instructional designers join art (kunst) and science (wissenschaft) to spark transformative learning experiences. My banner image, then, is a celebration of that holy union.