Whatever path digital artists take for professional development, one of the most important and difficult obstacles is discovering their unique creative style. Today, graphic designer has experience with both conventional and digital art. He is eager to provide some important suggestions and techniques for designers looking to discover and maintain their own style in business and theme flat graphics for a variety of applications. Consider what graphic artists could do to avoid sinking in a variety of styles and instead catch their own golden fish while achieving professional goals.
What is flat design?
Let's start with the nomenclature. Today, the term "flat design" refers to visuals for a variety of purposes and tasks that share stylistic traits. Flat design is a broad and diversified expression of digital art that is known for its minimalistic and succinct use of visual expressive tools. The word is now widely used as the inverse of "rich design" due to the harmonic simplicity that serves as the foundation of this design style. The most noticeable aspect, which inspired the direction's name, is the use of flat 2-dimensional visual details as opposed to extremely realistic and detailed skeuomorphic graphics. Flat design has been evolving over the last few years, spanning an increasing number of sectors of graphic design while remaining the most extensive and diverse use in the sphere of digital design for web and mobile interfaces. This design technique has been identified as the most effective for improving usability and visual harmony of user interfaces.
Although this style found expression in the realm of visual print design, such as posters, stamps, postcards, book covers, magazines, and so on, it expanded dramatically with the advent of digital design, particularly in the domain of user interface design. Websites and mobile applications that are experiencing dynamic development in creative search have opened up remarkable and lucrative opportunities for this minimalist and functional approach to design solutions. The approach was dubbed "flat design" (or flat graphic design), and it quickly became popular, ushering in a new era of graphic design that dared skeuomorphism and "rich design," and was aided by new problems presented by interaction design. The range of design directions available and evolving these days engages flat design illustration as a flexible and artistic method that has effectively earned its own niche. Our previous article discusses flat design, its history, and benefits.
How do you make flat illustrations unique and add own style?
Today, many designers express their ideas using flat illustration. To prevent being lost in the vast and ever-increasing diversity of artworks, you must develop your own presentation and style. It becomes more challenging in flat, which has fewer expressive options and volumes than other forms. However, tough does not mean impossible.
- Move away from simple geometrization of forms. Take your sketchbook and a pencil and make rapid sketches by hand. When opposed to making a digital image, the sketch will take far less time. Furthermore, it will make it easier to find bold lines as well as unique movements or poses for a character. After creating a sketch, analyse it well before attempting to experiment. Try hypertrophied, rounder, or sharpened shapes; they may provide valuable features explaining the nature of the movement or revealing the character's emotional condition.
- Examine works by other illustrators. Don't pass up the opportunity to study the principles and approaches they use. Consider what aspects or colour combinations made their artworks appealing to you.
- Choosing an engaging viewpoint and composition is one of the keys to creating a successful illustration. If you need to portray calmness, make sure the composition is balanced; if you want to demonstrate dynamics or tension, make it purposefully skewed. If the composition is multidimensional, the planning should be clearly visible: place emphasis on the plan where the main characters or elements are positioned. You can also add rhythm to the composition by scaling the parts or using colour and tone accents.
- Use fresh metaphors to assist communicate the idea behind the artwork. Don't just take the first images that come to mind; there's a good chance they'll be common and not appear unique enough to be truly eye-catching.
- A carefully chosen colour palette will serve to strengthen the idea and message, create the suitable mood, and highlight what is important. Maintain the tone contrast throughout the composition: to ensure that the chosen tones are right, view the illustration in black-and-white mode; it should remain contrasted and easy to read.
- The use of textures enhances the picture's vividness, originality, and "hand-made" feel. Additionally, it will soften the vector pictures.
- actual physical materials and features (such scratches or scuff marks)
- Geometric details (lines, stripes, and dots).
- Handmade items with not ideally even live lines
In addition, coloured pictures and full-color patterns can be utilised to simulate applique labour. All of the aforementioned options can be utilised independently or in combination, allowing you to define your own artistic style while creating flat design graphics.
6 characteristics of an excellent flat illustration.
Summing together all of the suggestions, we may describe the characteristics of excellent flat design illustrations.
Original stylization.
Well-thought-out composition
Non-standard perspective
carefully picked colour pallet.
Applying textures.
Use of metaphors
Try this checklist for your design experiments to make a flat design illustration; perhaps it will take you to the golden fish of your own distinct style.
Additional examples of flat illustrations
Here are some more illustrations from SALKA that demonstrate how the tips mentioned above can be creatively implemented. The designer demonstrates that the constraints of this style are only one more cause for pioneering experiments with flat design colours, perspectives, characters, and metaphors.
Practical Reading
How to become a graphic designer?
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How to make a Corporate Identity through Design?
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Typical Image Types for Web Content
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Creating a Logo for a Design Firm
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The Essential Components of a Web Page
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Winter Marketing Campaign for Graphic Design
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Best Design Practices for Single-Page Websites
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