Whenever I am working on a collage design, whether it be a wall collage for a client or a marketing piece for my studio, the intro lines to the Brady Bunch television show always start buzzing through my head.

Here’s the story… of a lovely lady…

For most of us those lines conjure up visions of that fabulous 1970s family in their 9-frame box all glancing around at each other.  But, by paying close attention to where the characters NEVER look, you will pick up on a very important rule when working with collage design.

Marsha, Peter, Jan, etc never look OUTSIDE of the box – always in towards their respective family members, as illustrated by the following diagram.

For me, designing a collage is a multi-step process that involves balancing out the color and directional feel of the images that the clients select for their piece.  The First Draft example shows the selected images simply dumped  into the template. This gives me an overall idea of what I am working with and quickly identifies any problem images (i.e. for this template, any images that won’t work well with a square crop.)

Next, I work to balance color, or in this case, light vs. dark images.  The Second Draft shows the images arranged to balance low key vs. light key. However, problems still exists.

Here’s the story… of a man named Brady…

I have a directional issue with three images, as illustrated with the red arrows.  A simple rearrangement of those images will pull the design into compliance with the Brady Effect and establish a well balanced collage.