5 Easy Ways to Make Your Design More Hygge

A leisurely walk through the top 5 ways to make a cosy hygge print design. Grab a cuppa and settle in.

. . . but I digress

I was really late to the party when I found out about the concept of Hygge after falling in love with a book cover. The lateness is not a shock, I’m usually 15 minutes late for everything. Now, I digress, but I’m absolutely helpless in the presence of a good book design and – even though I was stood in Scribbler, surrounded by hilarious greetings cards covered in distracting profanity – I honed in. It was Lagom by Linnea Dunne.

Lagom, I discovered, was the Swedish word roughly translating as ‘Not too little, not too much, just right’. Shortly after I became temporarily obsessed with the concept, which pointed me in the direction of the other Scandi ‘IT’ word it was riding the coat tails of, Hygge. An efficient, single Norwegian word for our long-winded ‘that really warm and snuggling feeling of getting cosy’. So, when the fabulous Hannah from Hannah Veale Photography came to me with a brief for her product brochure uttering the word ‘Hygge’, I uttered back, ‘I got you!’. Which, after a great deal of your patience and a bit of waffle brings me neatly to, how I did it:

My Top 5 Hygge Design Tips

1  |  Chill your bones

You’re not going to design anything Hygge with stress in your soul, so take a beat. Here’s a list of a few of the things I do to get in the zone:

• put on the most comfy clothes
  elastic waistband = tick, slouchy hoody = tick
• go for a walk into the woods with the dog*
  getting out in nature is scientifically proven to lower your stress levels, and even when I reaaaaaalllly don’t want to go, I always feel better after
  *dog optional
• snuggle up on the sofa with a cosy blanket and a good book
  you could do worse than parting with £10 and picking up the one shown above if you’re into it
• make a date with the kettle
  I don’t mean put the kettle on while you fire up the ol’ pixel box. I mean make a hot beverage, sit down, and do nothing but drink it and stare out of a window
• melt cheese onto something
  Cheese on toast, toasted sandwich… you know what?… a wheel of brie will melt itself at room temperature without any help, and with that in mind, baked camembert, get in my face
• doodle
  don’t make anything good, don’t try and finish something you were working on, just have a mess about with a pen and some paper

2  |  Colour pa-lette it go

Think earthy, natural, calm colours with a pop of interest. Colour research for a project is one of the most calming things you can do in my humble and feels so good when it clicks. If you want ‘hygge’ you have to go warm and cosy, but keep it on the fresh side, not hibernating bear pit.

I went with what I can best describe as Raw Sienna, Duck Egg Blue, Cream, and Warm Black. If you’re looking for colour inspiration I fully recommend Color Hunt a free website with thousands of colour palette suggestions you can save for later. It’s a good calming scroll if you’ve got 5 minutes, even if you don’t have a project in mind if I’m honest.

3  |  Designerate

Designerating is a silly word I made up in the studio that has developed into a way of describing my creative process. Now you’ve chilled out (1) and resonated with a colour palette (2) it’s time to do the creative/tricky bit. Everyone is different, so every designer is different. The below ideas may be utter twaddle to you, but they help me cut my concept development time down drastically, and sharing is caring.

• Stare at a blank page
  This has never in all my years creating, ever ever worked for me, but hey, I’m not judging, you may well be that genius.
• Start with Lateral Thinking . . . ish
  Lateral Thinking is a phrase coined by Dr. Edward de Bono in his 1970 book of the same name. A book on my reading list at university which as a grown ass adult I can unashamedly say, I did not get the whole way through. My uneducated take on it is ‘thinking is hard’ and ‘not every question has one answer’, but if you ask questions you get closer to it. I describe what I want in single words, then word associate in positive and negative directions. You don’t want to take the negative route, but thinking about it stretches your brain and makes it go off in all kinds of unconscious directions and sometimes it turns on that ol’ inspiration bulb. I’ve put it in a table below to make it clearer, and you can go all ‘excel spread sheet’ on it if you want, but I’ve found the back of a junk mail envelope just as good. ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ goals? Nailing it.

Hygge	Design Motif
warm	POSITIVE: fuzzy, reds, oranges, yellows, fire, chilli pepper, gloves, wool, woolly hat, NEGATIVE: sun burn, climate change,
comfortable	POSITIVE: balanced, cosy, slouchy, familiar, arm chair, soft focus NEGATIVE: boring, predictable, blah, rut
safe	POSITIVE: predictable, recognisable, protection, umbrella, NEGATIVE: sheltered, moly coddled, trapped
simple	POSITIVE: linear, small, clean, easy, NEGATIVE: dull, basic
natural	POSITIVE: fresh air, spring shoots, walking, beauty NEGATIVE: bland, exhausting, fake

• Get thee to Pinterest
  I take the words I’ve come up with above and use them as keywords to search on Pinterest, letting my mind drift in and out of aesthetic ideas for a solid 30 minutes. Now, I say Pinterest not Google because whilst the big G has got your back for reference (“who the fudge is Edward de Bono?”) the percentage of well curated quality images on Pinterest slaps Google round the face and shoulders with a damp, but beautifully lit haddock. You are also less likely to be distracted by cat memes, but it’s still a possibility.
• Take Stock
  My little rabbit hole led me to linear botanical illustration, swinging by a couple of other stops on the way. Now, I love drawing linear botanicals, but when it comes to a client’s budget for a project of this size, adding the commission of an original illustration screams ‘vanity project’ and just isn’t a good use of time or resources. I would always advise being as efficient as you can be for your client and yourself – you need to fit in that walk in the woods and snuggle in for coffee break, your client needs bang for their buck. So I plugged “line drawing botanical” into my royalty-free image library of choice, Shutterstock, and bless my soul if hundreds of other illustrators hadn’t been there before me and put in the hours. Less than a tenner later and I’ve purchased the rights to use exactly the right image for the job . . . a process of 30 minutes, not 30 hours. All I needed to do then was tweak to my colour palette and jobs a goodun’.

• Commit
  Layouts can be tweaked, colours can be adjusted, but concepts really need to not change half way through, sorry Edward. If you’re stuck choosing between two ideas (you lucky dog you!) choose the one that ticks the most positive boxes, and not just the one you really like the look of.

4 | Add by subtracting

Scandinavian design is based on simplicity, minimalism, and functionality, but without sacrificing beauty. Hygge is about appreciating the simple pleasures, whilst not depriving yourself. Keeping the information calm and ordered was the key to keeping the content on theme and clear as day. Such a shame the temptation to add more and more to the design was so real. I was aiming for crisp Nordic nature trail, and I was getting Laura Ashley sale bin on a wet Thursday.

Whenever I feel like I’m starting to over egg the design cake, I flash back to an awesome ‘in conversation’ at the Southbank Centre in 2014 between Oliver Jeffers (author and illustrator of Lost and Found) and Sir Quentin Blake (illustrator most famous for his collaborations with Roald Dahl). When asked the secret to making a great design or illustration, Sir Quentin summed it up as “sophistication not complication”. How ruddy wise is that? It was also the day I was named Lipty by a speed scribing Starbucks employee, but no wisdom was garnered from that encounter.

So I set about finding the right balance of content vs presentation. The front cover was the home for the wreath image I’d found and edited (above). I could have repeated it or watermarked it on the pages, but I really didn’t want it to get too fussy or – hells bells – make any of the text content unreadable. So I found another image that I could use as a little feature and broke it up. Each different sprig then found a home under each heading.

5 | On the grid

Last but my no means least, make sure everything lines up and sits on an invisible grid. Nice and clean. I would have put this in at number 1 – deciding on your grid should happen, at the latest, hand in hand with getting your full designerating on – but while I think they’re awesome, they’re a bit of a dry old bird to talk about. Now, I could wax lyrical about the best and worst ways to work with a grid. Weather to break it, or in this case, not break it (remember: simple; calm; hygge). I could walk you through the ins and outs, but I don’t veer far from the beaten track on this one. This is the wonderful logic of design, this is the maths, and greater designers than me have run the numbers (since the 13th century in fact) so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you’re new to grid law, I would recommend a quick read through 15 reasons why a grid based approach will improve your designs from Canva which covers the bases well as an intro to the topic.

In short, I used some nice fat margins (space around the edge of the page) and gave the headers (titles) lots of space so that the design and content could breath some clear Nordic air (negative/white space).

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Meet the Client

Hannah’s laid back style and atmospheric lifestyle photography is not just technically good, the quality of light she captures just feels like home. Check out her website here.

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