In a new book, two creative designers share tips to make minimalist designs meaningful

If you look at the way minimalist designs usually look, you would feel they are really easy to execute because, well, they don’t contain a lot of stuff. Actually, that’s far from the truth.

When you have a limited visual canvas, you have to ensure everything is pixel-perfect. However, one can easily master the art of making pixel-perfect designs with regular practice and by following some of these recommendations:

Colours

When it comes to execution, your colour scheme is the most critical thing on your canvas. A significant fraction of people decide whether to check your design or not based on the kind of colours you have used. When we started The Minimalist, we had a very strong reason for using the colour red for our brand. The idea was to provoke action, so we thought of choosing a colour that would have a thumb-stopping effect. In hindsight, we feel that by consistently sticking to that colour, we have managed to build a very unique brand language that people can recognise even if our logo has been removed. Having said that, we still experiment with a lot of colours because in many cases, one specific colour does not do justice to the communication. A cursory glance at our content will reveal that we have explored various colours based on the specific context in which a creative was made. Let us look at this example to demonstrate how colour choices can be made effectively. The following design highlights how girls are subjected to a lot of terms and conditions. To drive this point home, we came up with a hard-hitting caption: “Being a girl child is subject to illogical risks, please read the patriarchal documents carefully.”

Fonts

Choosing the correct font in your communication is the second most important piece, especially in designs where you are communicating your message using expressive typography, wordplay, ambigrams, etc. Just like humans have been categorised into 16 different personality types, every font also has its own personality. You have to pick the right font as per the target audience, tone and objective of your communication. You would be surprised to know that font psychology is actually a big research topic.

At its heart, font psychology is all about understanding different emotions associated with various fonts and using them to your advantage. For example, when we use Gotham in our communication it gives a very modern, professional and stable feel to the design which would be very different from, say, using Garamond or Baskerville or Comic Sans. If all of this is Greek or Latin to you, don’t worry. By learning some font basics and doing a bit of practice and experimentation, these things will become clearer over time.

A lot of times, you might have to build some custom letters to perfectly match the mood of your design. Perfectly executed ambigrams and dynagrams usually require custom typography and you will have to master the pen tool in Illustrator to execute some of them with utmost finesse.

Given the focus on fonts in minimalist communication, one has to find a perfect balance in terms of kerning, leading and tracking in the design. These are all nothing but ways to manipulate the spacing between characters. These special adjustments are an important tool to help create better readability and a more aesthetically pleasing design. A lot of times a perfectly kerned word can represent your idea in a much better way than a normally written word with default kerning. It is very important to experiment with these little things to find the perfect balance in your typography.

If you are new to the field of typography, here are some detailed definitions of these intimidating jargons:

Kerning: It is the adjustment of the space between two individual letters horizontally, to help the text become more readable and aesthetically pleasing.

Tracking: Tracking, which also involves horizontal spacing, is the adjustment of spacing throughout the entire word.

Leading: It is the design element of typography that determines how text will be spaced vertically in lines when your text is to be written in multiple lines.

One other important aspect of typography which has to be kept in mind is the size of the font which you are using. In many situations, you have to design communication that will be viewed on mobile, laptop, desktop or print together. Choosing the right font size, which will make the text visible, is quite important.

Animation transitions

Motion graphics in minimalism is one of the most exciting parts for people interested in animation. To make these transitions perfect, you need to simply follow some basic laws of physics – how collision works, the law of gravity, etc. Try to keep your transitions as natural as possible and they will appeal to your audience. Good design is transparent, and the same applies to good transitions in animation. Rather than distracting the audience, the objective should be to see how one can add more value to the idea in a very seamless way.

Refining edges

A lot of times, designers won’t notice this but every corner and edge in your design of your visual/text decides the mood of the design. If the corners of the visual are sharp, it will give a different feel as opposed to a design where they are rounded. Even the smallest of the shadows and borders around your visual and text has a big impact. You need to find a balance to see how you can use all of these available degrees of freedom in a way that will keep the visual less cluttered and match the vibe you want to communicate. For example, in the Suez Canal creative, that subtle shadow which has been added in the slanted line of Z adds a lot of beauty to the visual. It mimics the real situation in a subtle way. As a designer, you need to work on such minute details to iterate and elevate your visual by continuously following the Include, Exclude and Focus methodology.

Alignment, placement and aspect Ratio

Alignment of text and placement of visual elements is always important in any kind of communication but when it comes to minimalist communication, it becomes even more important because there are very few elements that are there on the canvas and all of them have to be in sync: like an orchestra to communicate the core message. First, you need to decide whether your copy is the hero of your communication or the visual. The hierarchy of your layout will depend on this decision. Keep in mind the basic principles of eye movement as well as the readability laws of typography and alignment to decide whether the communication should be left, right or centre-aligned. Also, keep a good aesthetic balance between the aspect ratio of your visual and your text size.

Logo placement

A logo if not placed correctly in the communication can spoil the entire layout. After careful experimentation, find a good place for your logo which can be used in a consistent way and give a good amount of importance to it.

Excerpted with permission from Think Like The Minimalist: Master the Art and Science of Creating Thought-provoking Design, Sahil Vaidya and Chirag Gander, Penguin India.