 Hi everyone, I'm Rob Horlacher from Project Sandbox, a University of Lethbridge Library Initiative. In this video, we're going to look at design theory and how that can help your research poster. A foundational element of design theory is the idea of layout and composition. This can make your documents more legible, can help direct the viewer's eye a little bit better. Really, it just makes your documents very readable and accessible for people. And if the whole point of that document is to make your research or whatever more accessible, this is something you should probably follow. To highlight some of these design concepts, I created a research poster which uses some elements of layout and composition, but totally fails to use others. So let's take a look at that. So as you can see, this is my bad research poster design example, as you can see from the pretty letters. Don't worry if you can't see the text. It's just dummy text for the paragraphs of the sections, just to give you an idea of how things are kind of laid out. Let's break down some of the concepts this actually does use from layout and composition. One of the main ones you can see it uses is it uses something called alignment. I'm sure you're familiar with alignment in some way, shape or form. So basically all of these things are aligned together to give you an idea of just to space things out evenly and create kind of a unity throughout your whole work. Although it's using this one design layout and composition example, it does not seem to help it. It does use some other things too though. Repetition is another example of a layout and composition. What I mean by that is all of the titles are the same typeface, same color, same everything to give you an idea that all of these are section titles. That's the same with all the fonts. It too uses the same font style for everything. If you look up top though, the bad research poster design example does not use repetition because this is messed up. You can take creative liberties with titles a little bit. So that's not necessarily wrong. But for the purposes of explaining this, let's call it wrong. Something else it does use is it does use contrast, which would be like the difference between titles and text. So it's using size and color to differentiate itself from the actual body of text. And then the final one is it kind of uses white space. White space could be like consider the space in between each section. If you look at the white space here, like the text is really tight to this inner square. So it doesn't feel like your project can really breathe and have ways for your view to go all the way throughout your poster. So let's correct some of these, not mistakes, but just like let's correct some of these things that could be done a little bit better. The first thing that I want to point out with all of this is your eyes don't know what to focus on. Your eyes kind of get scattered all throughout here. There's so much going on. So the first thing that we can get rid of to fix this is the background, because the background just adds way too much noise in an already text heavy document. So let's get rid of that already. It starts to seem a lot clearer to get our eyes working in a little bit of a better way. Something else that these documents tend to use quite intensely are boxes. Everything is a box within a box within a box within a box. There's just too many boxes and you don't need to use boxes to direct people's eyes or to let people know that everything belongs in a certain section. We can use a layout and composition element called proximity to do stuff like that. Just by seeing objects that are in proximity to each other, we can understand that there's a relationship. So the proximity of this body of text to this title lets us understand that those are connected. So I am going to do something crazy and get rid of all of these boxes and boxes in boxes. So I'm going to get rid of these more boxes to start and to lighten it up and to hopefully give it a little more white space. I'm going to get rid of these boxes. And now things seem like they can breathe a little bit better. There is nice space around the text. So like your eyes can really focus on that without trying to fight for preference of looking at the box or looking at the text. I do like these title bars. I like to keep them. You don't need to use them just having proximity and using things like contrast to differentiate the title text versus the body text would be good enough. But I want to keep them just to show you that it would still work. You can get rid of it. You would need to do some things because this is obviously white text against a white background with a little black outline. There's other ways to do stuff. So be creative still. The final thing that I don't like with this poster is I hate this top bar. I hate how you can see this defined line. And if we had the so if we had this top box here, you could see this defined line around here, which I think just looks awful. And then who knows what this graph is doing up here? Anyway, we're going to get rid of everything. OK, so this is the base document. This is just all of what your information would look like if everything was stripped away. Something else I would like to point out is that these have white boxes around it, too. So a way for that to blend into the background a little easier is just to use a white background. It looks totally fine. You can still use similar color schemes and stuff like that. But it's just a way to make your life a little bit easier so you're not trying to cut out this little bit and your document looks better because this thing seamlessly blends into it as opposed to having another box. So let's put some design back into here. The first thing I want to put in is I want to put those secondary title bars in here because I did say I liked them. What I am going to change about them, though, is the color because in terms of repetition, which is a layout and composition item, we already have some colors on this thing that we can utilize for that. So we have this color right here, and I'm going to use that for those secondary title bars because now there's repetition between this color and these colors. OK, so we got the title bar, which looks awesome. I'm also going to put the same bar at the top. This bar will be a good place to keep our actual title. And this is an instance where maybe a box does make sense. If it doesn't for you, all the power to you. It's always good to get rid of boxes because there's just far too many sometimes. All right. So now that we have that top bar in place, we are going to add the title text back. So just to remind you, this is what the title text looked like. So just to show you that I can even use the same typeface and everything like that. What we'll do is I'll add it right back in, but I'm just going to move around the elements a little bit to utilize white space a little bit better and to utilize proximity a little bit better. So this was the exact same typeface, except now this is all bolded versus just battery search being bolded. This author bar under here is directly associated with the title. Now, and then we got this little bit of information over here, which also due to proximity, you can understand that it's connected. Also due to proximity, you can understand this whole title bar is part of the same thing. You know, it's not a part of the actual body of the research poster. And then I do think that this looks a little plain. So I just want to add in a little bit of just some splash onto the picture. What I'm going to do to do that is to use these three remaining colors just with some simple lines. And then this adds just a little more dimension to the poster. Everything is still very clear and still very easy to read. And really, that's what's the most important aspect of this. So that's how you can use layout and composition is by using these five concepts. And just to highlight them again, the concepts are white space, proximity, repetition, contrast and alignment. So this uses all of those. So there's white space around things, which doesn't actually mean the space needs to be colored white. It just means negative space. It uses repetition so you can see all the titles are the exact same. The body text is the exact same. The colors are the exact same. It uses proximity. So the title is altogether abstract is with the abstract. Everything is together. And then, of course, it uses alignment. So everything is aligned really nicely. Abstract isn't like kind of off center right here. Everything is kind of set up the way it theoretically should be. The other thing I want to tell you about design theory is some color theory. Say you didn't want to use these colors. The reason why I use these colors was these are the default colors that Microsoft Word used to create this little pie chart. So that would be an example of if you don't want to figure out the colors that you should be using. Just use some of the default colors that your programs will already spit out, because generally those colors will be a little more thought out unless you do them yourself. But if you would like to do them yourself, there's some things you can follow. In terms of color theory, I'm just at this color dot adobe.com website. You have the ability to go to this too, because it is totally free. And what I like about this site is it sets up different color schemes for you that you can use and you can play with them and modify them a little bit to go over what some of these things are. We'll first look at analogous colors and just to clarify what I'm talking about. These are the colors that if you would like to choose your own, you can use them in your documents through just clicking this hexadecimal code, which is right here. And I'm just going to do control C just to take this color. If you wanted this color, you would do the same thing. And then if you had your documents, you could color whichever piece. Say I wanted to color this one. Don't worry about remembering what I'm doing in this, because I do have another video you can watch, but you could just paste that color in and then it would show up. So that's how you could use this. Anyway, going back to the website, this website will create different color patterns for you to use throughout your document. So there's a couple of different color setups you can use. The first one is analogous. So what analogous refers to is colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel. So if you pull this color and move it around, you can see that these colors all stay together. That's because they're, as I said, right next to each other. If you don't want to use analogous colors, you could use monochromatic colors. Monochromatic colors refer to colors that come from kind of the same section on the color wheel. So as we move this around, you can see it being used. And it's using colors just right in that same line on the color wheel. Triad is another variation you can use. So this is colors from three points on the color wheel that are evenly spaced from each other. I don't generally like to use triad that much. I like analogous a lot and the other one I like to use a lot is complementary. Complementary colors are really good if you want to have a couple of different colors that can contrast each other. The way complementary colors work is their colors that are across from each other on the color wheel. The one thing to keep in mind if you're using complementary colors in one of your posters is that you want one color to be dominant. You don't want them to be equal. So say we wanted this bluer color to be dominant. We would have say like the background with this guy, the title bar with this and then whatever else for this. And then we would use these colors to highlight specific things like links or to use them as like nice little bars at the top. Using these colors from complementary is just to create those nice little highlights around your poster if you want to bring attention to something. Whenever you're creating your poster, just make sure you try and adhere to the theory of layout and composition, along with some of this color theory. If you follow both of these different theories, your poster will be a lot clearer to understand and it will be a lot more readable and visually appealing for people. So that's what I have for you. Remember that although we discussed some elements of design theory, that is far from everything that you can possibly learn. Just be creative and try stuff out. Thank you very much for watching. And if you would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel, you can click on the image on the screen right now. Or if you would like to continue watching some of our videos, feel free to click on one of the video clips that are on the screen right now. Once again, thank you very much and I hope to see you soon.