C.R.A.P on the fly might make you the shiznit pt.2

In the first installment of C.R.A.P on the fly... I introduced the four major design principles,fondly known by the acronym C.R.A.P, which Robin Williams wrote about in her book,  The Design Book for Non-Designers.

Contrast

Repetition

Alignment

Proximity 

I've been using Anthony Weeks' work for a mini-case study exploring how graphic recorders might apply these design principles in the moment (on the fly). In post 1I covered contrast and repetition, so this time we'll jump into two new charts to see how alignment and proximity might come into play.

Alignment

Alignment is perhaps the toughest design principle to incorporate on the fly. In fact, it's honestly not that easy to do when doing studio work, if you don't draw guidelines in pencil. There are several different types of alignment, this post from printwand provides a more in depth explanation. For illustrative purposes I'll demonstrate here:


These lines of text
are left aligned

These lines of text are 

    right aligned 

These lines of text are 

center aligned  

There is also a type of alignment called justified, where the text is lined up on both the left and right, but it wasn't showing up right in blogger. 

The most popular alignment in printed materials designed for reading is left (think of the default setting in your fave wordprocessing program), whereas centered alignment is generally reserved for things like titles or other things that should stand out and aren't large blocks of text. When text is aligned it gives the eye a straight edge to move down when starting to read each line (our eyes like that), rather than a jagged edge where each line in a paragraph or other related block of information starts at a different place. And let's admit it we're lazy and having all the text lined up makes it easier to scan as well. Though alignment is a good thing, you don't have to go overboard and try to justify blocks of text, it's ok to have left aligned text with a jagged right edge, apparently that creates white space (and we like white space).  Another quick note on left-aligned vs justified is that left-aligned is generally seen as more approachable and friendly, which fits well with graphic recording, justified text is more stodgy (think strict newspaper columns).

Obviously, in graphic recording there is not one left margin that acts as a magical line for text. So if one is trying to align text they have to use several imaginary lines. While every single block of text above isn't aligned the majority of it is, and generally the text that isn't aligned is either indented or wrapped around an image. 

I've pulled out two portions of text to illustrate this point and made the invisible lines visible, though I didn't make a line for the bullets in the list on the left, notice that they too are aligned.

I also learned from Christina Merkley that lining up text makes it easier to go back and put boxes around it latter, and boy do we love boxes containers :)

Proximity

Last, but certainly not least is this graphic recording done of Patrick van der Pijl as he spoke about Business Model Generation. There is a lot going on in this chart, I don't know how long the original talk was but I'm familiar with the book and it looks as if he was giving a broad overview both on how the book came about and what it actually says. Proximity in a nutshell means that if things are close together, people assume they are related.  You can see that like things are indeed grouped together so that the answers to a given question are in close proximity to the box container holding the question itself. This is also where other elements such as contrast and repetition come into play which further help us differentiate between information. This design element requires balance because while you want white space in order to let things breathe a bit, placing them too far apart makes them seem unrelated. There are areas where a particular word might seem to drift off (see the "Why was Business Model Generation so Impactful" question in the bottom right and notice that "technologies" is further away than the other answers), however the use of dotted lines connects the text to it's anchor and reels it back in so it doesn't get lost in the sauce.  

Proximity also relates to how close an icon is to the text it is supposed to illuminate or drive home. Again look at the "so impactful" question notice how the computer is right next to "online revolution," had it been somewhere else on the page it wouldn't have worked. The same can be said for the coffee placed right next to the word Nespresso, one could have easily moved the cup down so that it sat right next to the list, rather than the title (after all the whole list relates to Nespresso), but it would take more mental gymnastics to figure out why a coffee cup was next to "What are the channels?."


So now that I've finished picking apart Anthony's work, I'll return to my original premise. I supposed that if one was able, in the moment, to apply all four basic design principles they would indeed be the shiznit. In this case, at least, I believe that my hypothesis was indeed correct.