From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

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Soften the edge

Soften the edge

From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

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Soften the edge

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- Hi, everyone. John McWade. Pictures are rectangular, almost always. That's how they come out of the camera, it's how they appear onscreen. It's not how we naturally see. We don't experience the world as rectangles, but our devices do. The thing about rectangles is that they have hard edges, straight and pretty severe. Straight lines don't really occur in nature, and so sometimes you want a way to soften those. One of my favorite ways is to break the line with another object that's not in a rectangle. Find a photo of an object that would or could be in the picture like this rock with no background. You do want a shadow. A shadow gives the impression that it's physically on the page in three dimensions. Now, good news is that on stock photo sites, objects like this with no background are easy to find. What you do is just set it on the photo. That's it. It breaks up the straight edges. And in this case, it also aligns with the other rocks, so your eye flows right out of the rectangle…

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