The Use of Texture in Graphic Design
Visual images are for our attention, entertainment, or trying to persuade. Graphic designer is a visual artist that creates art to communicate feelings, thoughts, and ideas through advertising, billboard, or illustration. Graphic designers use illustration, typography, and photography to convey a message or create an effect by visual means. People read books, newspapers, or magazines by their covers because designers use different elements to create texture, color, or hierarchy to make the images alive. The use of texture in graphic design is a very powerful eye-catching tool to alert the senses of things that are known to the human being. Textures used in cookbooks, magazine, newspapers, web designs, etc. In design, texture could be both physical and virtual. The texture can be actually felt by a person seeing the design, so it becomes even more powerful. However, texture only can be equally evoking with the adequate use of layered graphics or visual. Texture can be simulated through the style of a design. Texture can change the way we perceive colors and shapes such as grey can look like silver, velvet, or construction metal. Photography and illustration can also help to achieve the appearance of texture through the use of graphic design software such as Photoshop.
Layers of text, shapes, and lines can create the feeling of texture on an image. Using different layers, image can look classic and vantage by adding a texture that reminds the user of age, old, and slightly cracked paper. When designers use color or other elements to create the texture that makes the viewers actually have emotion feelings, it is called actual texture. The feel and weight of paper can impact viewers’ perception of design. For example, when we see a magazine picture of a perfume having a beautiful flowers lying at the base of the bottle, we usually scratch and sniff the page to find out how the perfume smells like.
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