Every designer has a job for one simple reason: there is light.

While that may seem like an overstatement, in practice, it’s every designer’s reality. Light is the basis for the designer’s trade. It gives us fodder for our imagination and furnishes us with the ultimate canvas on which we get the privilege of communicating.

“Light is the basis for the designer’s trade; it gives us fodder for our imagination…”

Think about it: without light, design would merely be conceptual and the true definition of abstract.

Light displays hues, tints, tone and shades; the most essential building blocks for our trade.
Light exhibits textures, giving our design character.
Light generates infinite color palette options, with which we use to nuance our creation.
Light exposes angles, giving us vast possibilities of perspective.
Light divulges subtle depth changes, allowing design complexities.
Light captures scenic moments in time, supplying us an endless collection of inspiration.
Light reveals elements such as heat and energy, with which we can struggle to depict.
Light illuminates pixels, yielding a playground of color structure to be manipulated by skilled eyes and hands.

Light is truly the bare essential tool in every designer’s hand. It’s infinitely complex, delicately simple and effortlessly available.
It precedes Photoshop, Illustrator, Plugins, Filters, Actions and even your favorite Canon or Nikon equipment.  Yes, light has no real need for any of these tools to exist. It is natural and untamed, which is what makes it so fascinating  and inviting.

“Light is natural and untamed, which is what makes it so fascinating  and inviting.”

However, the properties of light are absurdly complex and include more than just color and texture that make for award winning designs. Light also brings heat, energy, rhythm, purification, guidance, health benefits, etc. to the creative party, making it immensely important to our very existence (understatement).

When you have some extra time, do a study on the properties of light in conjunction with a study of creation story in Genesis 1. It’s fascinating to discover that God created “light” before He created the Sun and Stars (recall that “light” has many colors which
can’t be seen by human eye, such as Infrared light (too red) and X-ray light (too blue) – properties of light which cannot be seen by human eye without instrumentation).

All that to say…as designers, we should be most grateful that God had the foresight to provide us with such an amazing benefit as light.  Go create with it, He did.