Book “Graphic Design. Visual Grammar »

Whatever types of graphic design you are involved in, your main task is to convey a message to the addressee. In order for the target audience to receive and accept the necessary information, it is necessary to correctly format it using visual communication tools. The book of designer and teacher Christian Leborg is devoted to this very language of visual communication. He begins with such basic concepts as shape, color, saturation, balance, symmetry, reflection, repetition, movement, direction and so on, and pays attention to all the basic rules of graphic design. The book can serve as a convenient reference for designers of any field.

VISUAL GRAMMAR | FOREWORD
Visual language and grammar

This book is for everyone who is interested in the visual world, and it doesn’t matter whether you want to be creative, to study for yourself or to teach others.

A general characteristic of all these subject areas is their practical orientation. Experience is gained through an act of creativity. Obtaining such knowledge requires a lot of time, and this act is associated with practical activity. Another aspect of creative practice is its expressiveness. This requires the intuition necessary to describe the feelings, moods or thoughts of a person. This knowledge is closely related to bodily sensations.

People create and receive a huge amount of visual messages. Without a common understanding of visual language, many of these messages are unclear. A visual language does not have strict syntax or semantics, but visual objects as such can be classified. This book organizes the visual, before you primer of the visual language.

Since knowledge about visual objects can be obtained through the physical, sensory sphere and applied without resorting to written or spoken language, knowledge and experience are transmitted with minimal use of verbal language. However, there are a number of basic processes before and after the act of creativity, where a verbal language can be useful. A person’s thoughts about what he is going to create, about what he created, change the process. We think differently when we have a language that allows us to describe something. This book contributes to the creation of such a language. It is also a visual dictionary that will help you to write in written and verbal form about visual objects and what they are intended for.

The task of visual grammar is the same as that of the verbal language: to identify the main elements, describe what is happening and establish the relationship between the individual elements. I divided the book into four chapters: 1) abstract objects and structures; 2) specific objects and structures; 3) actions and 4) relationships within these structures.

While working on the book, I relied on the works of geniuses who developed and described the visual language. I would also like to thank Annette Wang, who cheered me up when I needed it, and the publisher Einar Plinn, who did not cheer me up at all. Thanks to Ingve Lien and Bjorn Kruse for constructive criticism. In addition, I received many reviews and comments from professionals and amateurs, from family and friends. Thank you all very much!

I hope that by reading this book you will soon be able to better express your thoughts about the visual world and to read visual messages more confidently. Your visual thought process will gain momentum, so that you will begin to produce more good ideas, and your visualization ability will develop so that you can experience them.

This book will help you, no matter what area you specialize in and how far you have advanced. Join our ranks of fighters with visual illiteracy!

Christian Leborg
Oslo, January 2004

Excerpt

»More information about the book can be found on the publisher’s website
» Table of Contents
» Excerpt

For Savory Agents 25% off coupon - Graphic Design