Design Drafts

This course is adapted from a book by Ken Jeffery,

entitled: Graphic Design and Print Production
Fundamentals, licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License, and available for
download from: http://open.bccampus.ca.
 Development Process

The development of graphic forms starts with exploring a wide range of

styles, colours, textures, imagery, and other graphic devices
and refining them through development stages until you are left with
those that best reinforce the concept and message.

The development process starts with thumbnails and works through rough
layouts and comprehensives (Comps) to the final solution.
 Design Development

PURPOSE
If you find yourself designing something
brilliant, but it doesn’t communicate what it
should to the right audience, then all that
brilliance is wasted.

All design works are intended tocommunicate

to a specific audience, and the design
must support that function.
 Design Development

EXPERIMENT
Once you have a lot of ideas, take one you
think is good and start exploring it.

Try expressing the same idea with different

visuals, from different points of view, with
different taglines and emotional tones.

Make the image the focal point of one

variation and the headline the focal point of
another.
 Design Development

Time
If you are still developing an understanding of
your personal design strengths and
weaknesses, allow extra time for each stage
and track your time for each stage
 Design Drafts

The following is an outline of the three

stages in the draft design process:
THUMBNAILS
Thumbnails are small, simple hand-drawn sketches, with minimal
information. These are intended for the designer’s use and, like concept
maps, are visuals created for comparison. These are not meant to be
shown to clients.
ROUGHS
These are used to determine exactly how all of the elements will fit together,
to provide enough information to make preliminary evaluation possible, and to
suggest new directions and approaches.
The rough uses simple, clean lines and basic colour palettes and includes all of
the visual elements in proper relationship to each other and the page.
COMPS
Comps are created for presenting the final project to the client for evaluation
and approval. The comp must provide enough information to make evaluation
of your concept possible and to allow final evaluation and proofing of all
content.
The comp is as close as possible to the final form and is usually digital.
Placeholders can be used, if photographs or illustrations are not yet available.