- Start with a plain document.
Use one of your favorite layouts you created for the assignment in Lesson 9 (Frames and Boxes). Make a few copies of it in your page layout software so you can compare different versions onscreen (as well as printed out).
- Add a single piece of clip art.
Find a single piece of clip art that fits the theme of your document. Try out different ways to use that one piece of clip art — including repeating it in some way on different panels or pages, changing the color, altering the size.
- Add more images.
Assuming you are using the text from previous lessons that all relate to starting a business, find clip art or dingbats that, to your mind, represent: working from home, contracts, business plans, and business identity (the subjects of the individual articles from those previous lessons). Add them to your document in various ways. Use them as-is once. Another time try different ways of unifying the images through size, color, or other means.
- Add even more images.
If you’re using plain bullets for the bullet lists in your document, change to something else. Use different bullets for each list.
- Compare your documents.
Print out copies of all the versions with their different bits of clip art. Which do you like best? Are there some that are almost but not quite right? Go back to those and make a few tweaks to the size, placement, or style of the clip art to improve the document. As with other assignments, show them to family and friends to get their input on what looks cluttered, what looks boring, what looks good.
Feel free to share your favorite good and bad versions (especially the ones you feel are good examples of using clip art) with your peers. Log into the DTP Classroom and attach a screen shot or a PDF of your clip art filled document. Tell us why you like or don’t like your samples.
The next lesson in this series is about nothing at all — white space, negative space, the blank space on the page.
Found this page by accident? This is one of 12 lessons delivered as part of the Rules of Desktop Publishing free email class.
Quotable Design
| “Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.” — Peter Bilak - Illegibility |
| Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. |
| “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” — John Updike |
