Beyond the moon, by my dreams.

Focus!

Having a clear focus is always the first thing you should do when editing. Your focus is what your design should be built around to support! By focus, I mean whatever it is you want viewers to first notice in your design and/or to focus on your design. A good composition always makes it clear what the focus is without necessarily making it obvious. Making your focus clear can be as simple as making it the largest thing in your design, or subtle as in it's the only thing with an accent color.

A good, but silly way, to check whether you have a strong focus, is to zoom out really far and look away! If, when you look back, the first thing you automatically look at is your desired focus, then you composition certainly has a strong focus! Looking at the Jaws poster, the very clear focus are the shark and the movie title! If you were to squint your eyes, or zoom out really far, you would still be able to make out the shape of the shark and the title of the movie.

2. Balance!

Keeping balance is also key to a good composition. However, it's important to note that balance does not mean 1:1 mirroring! It simple means, that all aspects of a design feel as equally 'heavy' as each other. For example, if you have a poster, and one half of the post consists of a collage of various objects, you can balance the other half by adding something that takes up just as much space, such as big text! Alternatively, you can add something that uses similar colors to the other side, like a big, colorful shape or gradient.

Looking once again at the Jaws poster, the white space above the water is balanced by the red words and the woman swimming. Despite it technically taking up less space than the shark and the water, it still manages to be fairly balanced because, while smaller, it has stronger contrast! So it evens out!

3. Consistency!

Something as small as having consistent lighting or consistent textures makes a HUGE difference when it comes to a good composition! Across the entirety of the Jaws poster, there's a clear consistency in depth by having darker shadows in the bottom, and brighter shadows on top. And in texture, across the whole poster their is a consistent, grainy texture. Small consistent details add up to make things look nicer and more tied together.

4. Hierarchy!

Hierarchy, in design, refers to what goes first to what goes last. It ties back to focus! The hierarchy of the poster let's you follow down to piece together the general plot of Jaws without necessarily telling you. It goes "Jaws" -> Woman swimming -> Shark. So while the focus is what garners attraction, a clear hierarchy, or order, is what makes the intention and sequence of your design clear!

5. Learn rules to break rules!

Learning general, basic rules of design, helps you get better at composition. And having a good understanding of rules, let's you break them well. In the Jaws poster, the flatness of the text is not consistent with the texturing of the rest of the poster nor is the bold color of the text consistent with the muted colors. But this all works perfectly to balance out the fact, that the title takes up a tiny amount of space up top compare to the rest. And it gives it enough contrast, that despite being 'smaller' than the shark, it still stands out MORE than the shark! Breaking rules in design is never a bad thing if you know how to go about it!

There's many more things to learn about composition! Here's 3 articles that talk a little more in depth about developing your compositions, and different ways to make them look good:

Amadine - Composition in Graphic Design

Shumi Perhiniak; Yes, I'm a Designer - Compositional Principles in Graphic Design

Canva - 10 Rules of Composition

3 things to always take into account when it comes to picking your colors is the hue, value and saturation of that color. Putting it really simply, hue is what color it is, value is how dark or light a color is, and saturation is how vibrant a color is.

It’s also good to know the color groups. There’s three groups of colors:

Primary colors! Which are red, blue, and yellow.

Secondary colors! Which are mixes of primary colors, like purple which is a mix of red and blue.

Tertiary colors! Which are a mix of primary and secondary colors, like pink which is a mix of purple and red.

You can also split the color wheel to see warm colors (red to yellow) and cool colors (green to purple).

Now you know the very basics color, hooray! Now you just need to put them together! You can do this using these 7 standard color schemes, sometimes also called color harmonies.

*this graph is from this article.

Analogous - is a color scheme using three colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel.

Complementary - is a color scheme based on colors opposite of each other on the color wheel.

Triadic/Triad - is a color scheme based on three colors evenly split on the color wheel.

Monochromatic - is a color scheme consisting of various shades of one hue.

Tetradic/Tetrad - is a color scheme that connects two sets of complementary pairs, it makes a rectangle on the color wheel.

Split-complementary - is a color scheme based on a color and the two colors beside that color’s complementary color.

Square - is a color scheme based on four evenly split colors on the color wheel, it tends to form a square, hence the name.

Now, you can use all that you know and apply it to your colorings and graphics! Let’s color something together! We’re going to use a split-complementary color scheme, with pink! Pink’s split complementary colors are blue-green and yellow. So let’s start!

Hm. As you can see, while we did use the colors, it doesn’t feel totally right, now does it? This is where hue, value, and saturation come in! We have the hue, sure, but their values and saturations don't compliment each other at all! The yellow being so saturated and vibrant makes the magnets look almost neon, whereas it washes out all the cooler colors, like the green in Thirteen's eye. 

So let’s say we want the magentas and pinks to be our focus color, green and yellow are here to complement/accent it. So, let’s lower the saturation of the yellow to match the green. We can also mix a little of cyan to the green hues in order to make the green cooler to nicely contrast the yellow’s warmth. Which effectively makes the yellow and green both compliment and contrast each other well which lets them work more cohesively with the pinks! We can also darken the blacks, and warm the whites to keep a good amount of contrast between the shades, but it also makes all the hue’s appear to have more similar values in comparison to the black! 

So now, the pink, yellow, and green, now all look to have similar amounts of brightness simply because the blacks are darker. The yellow and green have similar saturation to each other, while the pinks are more saturated, which makes the focus stay on pink while the other two hues compliment it. So we end with this:

Much better, isn't it? The only adjustment layers I used we’re a gradient map at the start, then I added Selective color, Hue/Saturation, and Vibrance. It just took lots of tweaking! But knowing basic color rules, I was able to do it real quickly. Of course, afterwards, you can add lots more layers to make it a stronger or heavier coloring, but for now we’ll leave it simple.

To learn more in depth on how to use some of the adjustment layers, I recommend reading through canarysage’s photopea for dummies posts! 

Lastly, here’s some articles and videos I used to learn, some of which that go more in depth than I did, that might help you further:

Colormaters - Basic Color Theory

Interact-design - Color Theory

Leighcotnoir - Hue, Value, Saturation

Canva - Color theory and the color wheel

Figma - What is color theory?

Colormeanings - Color Harmony

Bluebiscuits’s Basic Color Theory video