An essential photographic tool that a good photographer will often use is compositional rules. Compositional rules refer to the simple act of framing your subject in the viewfinder in such a  way to make the final picture of greater interest or to have greater impact. It is not unusual for a new photographer to frame a subject exactly in the middle of the viewfinder to do this. While this is technically not bad, this sort of composition usually isn’t very interesting.

Compositional rules are really just guidelines…there really aren’t any rules in photography period. Depending on the subject and situation, using these guidelines will teach you to see your pictures in a different way and change your approach to photography in a very positive and different matter. Let’s take a peek at some of them.

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When I start a document, I always start with a few things before I can put my ideas down, planning and forward thinking are incredibly valuable when time is of the essence. Here are some quick tips I see many designers skip.

1. Plan what you want first. Do not design in any programs. This means use sketches, doodles, or any idea before you get into the tools. The Creative Suite is merely a design tool for which to carry out the wishes of the designer.

This includes making sure you aim for the right number of pages (this is especially important with pagination in booklets and magazines), bleed and page size.

2. Set your styles. This will determine what your document will look and feel like before you put the content in. This would include your body copy style (font family, size, leading, kerning, etc), all your headers and sub heads (I usually start with about 4 sub heads for large documents), image styles (borders, shadows, etc), and page numbering. I am a huge stickler when it comes to consistency, I think it should be exactly the same on each page and shouldn’t change any time.

This will save you hours later on when you see something isn’t consistent. I’ve forgotten to count before hand and screwed up a large magazine before, trust me on this one.

3. Set your margins. Do not let anything cross this line! A good starting point is a minimum of 0.125″ usually. A quick method I have used in the past is take the tallest capital letter in your main article title and double it. This is the width to start with. Larger banners will need a bigger margin, obviously.

4. Never “Eye Ball It”. You are a precision designer charged with a precision job, now’s the time to show it and not “guess” the distance. There are a couple different ways to make sure you can stick to this staple:

• Use guides. “Eye balling it” is what separates us as designers from the amateurs.  Little differences effect design projects in the largest of ways.
• Make little boxes that do not have any fill or stroke to a specific size and measure the distances to make sure everything is consistent. e.g. the space between a header text box and a three column body copy text box.
• Crack out your ruler to measure a sample if you need to. A calculator and thickness gauge are also important manual tools.