The design space

- [Instructor] When we talk about a design space, we're talking about the area in which we are working, and I'm not talking about your desk and your chair. I'm talking about whether it's a page, or a spread, or a banner, or a screen, or any other kind of thing that you're designing on. There are a number of ways that we can divide that up before we begin putting anything onto it. Let's just have a look at a few different ways that we might divide things up, and some of the theories around page or design space division.

Let's start off by looking at photography because photography for a long time has employed something called the rule of thirds, and, in fact, so has classical art. A way of dividing the image up into nine different sections, all in thirds. You can treat each section itself as a design environment. Typically, the horizon would have been aligned along the bottom third, although sometimes for an extreme event or if you're perhaps doing a landscape, it would be the top third.

Anywhere apart from the middle because that's the bit that's really boring if it looks too symmetrical. You can use the intersections of the lines as points of interest as well. You can align either directly on them or, as is the case here, towards them. Another theory is that of the golden section and the golden spiral or the Fibonacci spiral. That may help you create a pleasing layout. You can see here how this layout of the area within the margins conforms to a golden spiral layout.

When you're dealing with things like banners, for example, that's a completely different design environment in which the spiral isn't readily accommodated as a whole, but there's nothing to stop you dividing it into sections. You could take an easier approach though and use something like columns, as has been done here. These are pretty much squares as they go out, and you could subdivide those also to help you position other elements. That way you'll get a nice proportioned layout for whatever environment you're working in.

On pages, there's lots and lots of theory around those, but again the system you're most likely to use is based on columns. It's quite common to subdivide those so that you get flow lines across the page, just to help you divide things up nicely. All great design starts that way, by dividing up the design space before you start thinking about the positioning of elements, which is what we're doing in the next movie.