Tips & Tricks To Amp Up Your Designs: Your Backgrounds Don't Have To Be Blank

 

When creating any kind of design that incorporates bodies of text, titles, etc. that can be all to easily left as simple bodies of text over even simpler, flat, colored backgrounds and shapes that don't add to the overall design at all. But your design doesn't have to be left this way, in fact, if you want your piece to be particularly eye-catching or interesting at all, it shouldn't be.

A really great option to add some life to your design as a whole is to put something such as a photo or pattern of some kind in the background.

This can be accomplished by creating a simple pattern of repeated shapes or symbols in a darker shade of whatever color is being used as the primary background of your piece, as can be seen here:

This example is from a booklet I created for a fictitious event that featured various speakers. I could have left the background a flat white or off-white color, but instead I created a pattern resembling buildings and landmarks from the city the event was theoretically going to take place in and drew them in an extremely light purple so that they were still visible but not overwhelming at all.

Another example is using a photo that you have turned grayscale and placing it behind a slightly sheer colored shape that has text over it as seen here:

Hiking imagery courtesy of Unsplash.com

In this example, I turned a simple image of a man hiking to be black and white. Then I took a blue rectangle and placed it over it and turned it down to only an 80% opacity so that you can still see the image but it doesn't overwhelm the text. The key thing to remember when using photos as your background is that you may have to play around with the opacity of colored shapes you're using over them (if any) so that you can still see the image but you can still clearly read any text you have over it. Additionally, you need to pay close attention to how much or how little contrast you have going on between the appearance of the color over the photo and the text itself because if you don't have enough, the text can become difficult to read.

To learn more about the importance of contrast, visit:

https://designbylibby.blogspot.com/2021/01/graphic-design-101-good-vs-bad-color.html