How to find the right design reference?
Whether you’re new or old, finding references is a crucial part of the design process, because one designer’s brain can’t compete with the rest of the world. Although reference is not necessarily the standard for your design, it can have a directional effect on your creativity and design. It is no exaggeration to say that finding the right reference for your design is half the battle.
There are a lot of articles sharing design reference website, but not a good website can find the right reference, this we should have a deep experience, but about how to share the reference article is not much, so green Onion to make up for this market vacancy, hee hee!
There’s a way to find references, and I’ve broken it down into the following four steps:
First, determine the requirements
Before looking for reference, we must first understand the needs of customers or bosses. Take packaging design as an example. Do not blindly look for a mask package as soon as you hear that it will be very inefficient and easy to go astray. The right thing to do is to ask them the mask of the product function, main component, the main selling point, go professional line or cosmetic line, product, price, target groups, whether to import, the acceptable range of packaging costs, customers have a tendency to design style or color, do you have any customer is interested in brand on the market, and so on, these are all we look for the reference of the compass, Ultimately, it also affects whether or not your design sells.
Of course, most of the time, customers have no direction about the design problem. At this time, we need to use our own professional knowledge to guide them, for example: If this mask is a cosmetic line, aiming at the mid-market, main ingredients are the sargasso, fruit, such as the consumption object is 25 to 35 year-old female white-collar workers, then we can suggest the customer walk concise, fashion, natural style, anyway, is to sit down and the demand determines the start again, do not wise to help customers set everything.
Two, where to find?
After determining the requirements, we can go to collect information and find references. The first thing to consider is where to find? Although many articles to recommend websites to you, but like me so comprehensive and classification so clear should not be much, take away not thank, hee hee!
1. Print advertising design
www.behance.net advertising column, www.welovead.com, www.niice.co, www.adsoftheworld.com, petal network
2. New media advertising design
Petal.com, Shuying.com project column, SocialBete case column
3. Packaging design
www.behance.net packaging design column, www.niice.co, No. 9 Gutian Road, Station cool, Bao Networking, petal network, Tmall (slightly famous brands almost have flagship stores in Tmall, so, in tmall direct search brand name or category name can also be early to some good packaging cases).
4. Logo design
www.stocklogos.com, Design house, LOGO circle, petal net, No. 9 Gutian Road, Zhicu.com
5. Brand design
Brand New, www.behance.net Brand promotion column, www.hiiibrand.com, Zhicu.com, 9 Gutian Road
6. Font design
Station cool net, petal net, gu Tian road 9
7. UI design
Dribbble, UI China, www.ui8.net, www.behance.net user interface column, website cool
8. Web design
Web design columns at www.siteinspire.com, www.thebestdesigns.com, www.onepagelove.com, www.awwwards.com, and www.thebestdesigns.com
9. Album design
www.behance.net print column, www.niice.co, Petal Net, 9 Gutian Road, Design House
There should be some of the above websites that you often visit, and I have listed them one by one. I hope you will not think me wordy. In fact, there is a good way to find reference is to buy books, buy some excellent works at home and abroad, in fact, there are a lot of good works can not be found online, because some companies or institutions to organize them into books for selling money, so it is necessary to spend some money to buy some design books.
Three, how to find?
We already know where to find the reference, the next is how to find the problem, turn the book naturally without me to say more, I will share how to use the website to find the reference. Individual website classification will be classified into specific industries, this nature is to follow his navigation to find, such as The Ancient Tian Road 9, but most of the site is not classified too fine, so in view of the specific needs to find a reference, in order to improve efficiency we mainly have to rely on the site’s search engine. On how to search I will elaborate from the following two aspects.
1. Search for direct keywords
Take the fighter Jet Behance and Petal for example and imagine looking for a mobile AD. For Behance, you first have to find the AD column in the menu bar and then type in the search bar on the right. The easiest thing to think of is, of course, mobile phone (mobile phone is best in English search, do not understand the words with Baidu translation, through this method, I finally put their English to the third grade level, hee hee!) “, this is the most accurate, but after pressing the Enter key, we find that the search works are not many, and it may be difficult to find the right one at once. At this time, we can search other keywords according to our own needs.
For example, because mobile phones belong to science and technology products, we can search keywords: science and technology, electronics and so on; Because the function of mobile phone is call, so we can also search keywords: communication, telecommunications, etc.; If the AD is mainly about the phone’s ability to take pictures, we can search for keywords: camera, take pictures, etc., which are more focused words. We can also according to their own design style keyword search, for example, I want to do 3D effect, you can enter the keywords 3D, C4D; If you want to do illustration style, you can enter keywords: illustration, hand painting and so on.
There is an important way is, if you have already thought for a general idea, but don’t know how to performance better, this time you can according to you the idea of keyword search, for example in function good advertising expression on the phone, you want to use dialog to do creative, you can input dialog box to search. The search method on Petal is the same, but with an additional keyword: ads or print ads (depending on the design type).
2. Search for brands with similar tonality
Another good way is to find brands that advertise similar products well. For example, mobile phone brands include: iPhone, Samsung, Nokia, Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, etc. (There are not many domestic brands in Behance, but we can find them in Petals). If we want to do mobile advertising mainly targeted at young people, we can also search for brands in the same type but in other industries, for example: NIKE, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Biaoshi, Happy Boy, Tmall, etc., although their products are not mobile phones, they can be used for reference in design style, color matching, model selection, font, typeset and so on.
The above examples are from behance and Petal. In fact, all types of design have the same way to find references, and other reference websites have the same way. As the saying goes: It is better to teach people to fish than to give them fish. I won’t waste my breath.
Four, how to screen?
The last question about finding references is, how do you pick out the entries that are worth attending? Those of you who have participated in the brainstorming experience should have had such experience: we went to the same website according to the same needs, and even searched for the same keywords to find references, but the results of the discussion and ideas are not the same, the quality of these references is very different.
Take the mask packaging mentioned above as an example, I learned that it is a hydrating mask, so I found a lot of hydrating mask, mask, hydrating skin care products, water and even juice packaging, almost 100 or 200 pieces, obviously I have to continue to do screening.
I have my own understanding of good packaging design, which is almost as follows: 1. Good-looking; 2. 2. Identification; 3. Originality (of course you can ignore this when looking for references); 4. Conform to product attributes; 5. Consistent with brand positioning, 6. Novel expression techniques. In fact, looking for references is almost the same as these points, coupled with the customer to determine the style of simple fashion, so we began to use the elimination method to delete those inappropriate references:
▲ Like the above two packaging, the form is very novel, also very identifiable, but the characteristics of water is not obvious, and the feeling is too professional line, we do not plan to do this type of packaging, so eliminated.
▲ The above two reference water characteristics are obvious, the tone is also more consistent, but the feeling is too popular, not enough characteristics, not enough to look good, so also to be eliminated.
▲ The above is because it is too simple, although we originally wanted to be simple, but the customer wants to design with content and details, so this style of design is easy to be mistaken by the customer that we did not spend any energy, so it was eliminated.
▲ The above two packaging is very beautiful, the characteristics of hydration is obvious, but the style is too small and fresh, more suitable for consumers under 25 years old, so it is useless.
▲ Ha ha, this drop of water I almost see vomit.
In this way, I cut down one reference after another, and ended up with two pieces that I felt were worth referring to:
▲ The first one is because of its novel form of expression, composition and typesetting are also good, if the feature of water replenishment is added, the main vision will be more prominent, there should be room for improvement, so I think it has reference value.
▲ The second package is mainly because of its obvious water characteristics and strong identification. The design is simple and detailed, and the layout and color collocation are also very fashionable.
Having selected the appropriate reference, what is left to do is to follow the reference directly? Of course not, first of all, few references are exactly the same as our needs, more importantly, plagiarism is a shameful behavior, we should try to avoid, then what should we do specifically? Don’t worry, see you next time!
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