As I continue to advance my design skills, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to design decisions that are made in various publications I run across.

Today, I’m going to point you to two examples that are basically the same type of content, but done different ways. The key to remember is that each example is very effective, yet really easy to create.

Both examples come from X-Ray magazine which is all about QuarkXPress. The magazine is available for free on their site, so I’m going to give you direct links to the PDFs so you can see exactly what I’m talking about.

In both examples, go to page four of the magazine and look at how the designer handled the Contributing Authors section.

First up is issue 4.2. (http://www.xraymag.com/pdfs/xrv42.pdf) Like a lot of magazines, X-Ray includes photos of their authors, commonly referred to as headshots. What we’re going to focus on is how the designer is tying those pictures together with the bio text. We’re not going to concern ourselves with color or font choices.

As a background for the author bios, the designer used a rectangle with curved corners. Anyone with even minimal knowledge of their layout program could create that in a few seconds.

The pointers that come out from the rectangle point to the author headshots. My guess is that the designer created a small square, then rotated it 45-degrees and positioned it so half the square couldn’t be seen since it’s using the same color as the rectangle. So you’re left with half a square visible giving the impression of an arrow or pointer. Even if the designer used some other method, what I just outlined would work and could be done pretty quick.

Next up is issue 4.4. (http://www.xraymag.com/pdfs/xrv44.pdf) The designer used a different approach for the Contributing Authors section this time. The headshots were placed in a circle with a line connecting the photo to the author’s bio. The right side of the line ends with a solid circle.

Designing a magazine takes a lot of skill, but this designer used very simple, yet effective techniques to add interest to what could have been a visually boring page. To me, that’s the mark of an very good designer. Not surprisingly, that’s often the same type of design that direct marketers are looking for.

When you’re starting out it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the decisions you need to make on projects. But as you’ve seen in these examples, keeping things simple and using shapes that you can create in just a few seconds is often an excellent starting point when you’re not sure what to do.

If there’s any “trick” to this process, it’s how to take the different things that you know how to do – like how to create a circle, square, line and rectangle – and combine them into something useful for your projects. That’s why it’s important for you to pay attention to what’s being done by other designers, break it down into pieces, then rebuild it into a layout or design that’s all your own.