Daily Doodle

Women's
Baseball Day

National Make Up
Your Bed Day

Properties of Design Elements II

Points, lines, and planes can have various properties or aspects of how they are perceived. These are often listed out as:

• Shape
• Color
• Scale
• Texture
• Pattern

Let's continue to take them one by one...

Design Element Property: Scale

Scale is Relative

A graphic element can appear larger or smaller depending on the size, placement, and color of the elements around it. When elements are all the same size, the design feels flat. Contrast in size can create a sense of tension as well as a feeling of depth and movement. Small shapes tend to recede; large ones move forward.

Scale can be both objective and subjective

Objective Scale refers to the literal dimensions of a physical object or the correlation between a representation and the real thing it represents, like in maps and models:

Subjective Scale refers to one's impression of an objects size:

A book or a room, for example, might have a grand or intimate scale. An image "lacks scale" when it has no clues that connect it with lived experience.

Developing a sensitivity to scale is an ongoing process for every designer.

Design Element Property: Texture

It's kind of hard to define, but you know it when you see it. If you can imagine what it might be like to feel with your fingers, it's probably a texture. One definition: Texture is the tactile grain of surfaces and substances.

Textures have symbolic value:

• A velvety smooth printed surface might be appropriate for a Spa brochure

• A rusty metallic image might be right for a garage punk metal band

• Leathery embossed paper for a Harley-Davidson catalog
• Can you give me some other examples for using these textures?

Design Element Property: Pattern

Pattern is a special type of texture that takes an element or elements and repeats them systematically.

While our textbook says “there must be a systematic repetition with obvious directional movement,” but I disagree, there's an interesting mathematical expression of a pattern called Penrose tiling that doesn't do this, and in fact, never repeats itself while still appearing to be a pattern

Design Principles

Now that we have our elements (point, line, plane) and properties (shape, color, scale, texture, pattern), let's talk about the Principles of Design, or the principles you use when you compose a visual. To me, this is an arbitrary set — some folks list more, some less. This is my own set, but it's based closely on the ones in Graphic Design the New Basics:

• Rhythm & Balance
• Figure & Ground
• Framing
• Visual Hierarchy
• Layers
• Transparency
• Unity

Rhythm & Balance

Balance is a fundamental human condition:

• We require physical balance to stand upright and walk
• We seek balance among the many facets lives
• Our brains constantly struggle to find balance, physically, visually, and even aurally
• Balance is restful, imbalance is stressful

In design, in general:

• Balance anchors and activates elements in space
• Visual balance occurs when the weight of one or more things is distributed evenly or proportionately in space
• Large objects are a counterpoint to smaller ones; dark objects to lighter ones

Symmetrical design

• Has the same elements on at least two sides along a common axis
• Is inherently stable
• Does not need to be static!

Asymmetrical design

• Doesn't have the same elements on at least to sides along a common axis
• Is inherently unstable
• Yet can be made stable!

Rhythm

Is a strong, regular, repeated pattern:

• The beating of drums
• The patter of rain
• A sequence of visual elements aligned and repeated

Many visuals have an innate rhythm. Disrupting the rhythm can be a powerful principle in controlling where the eye rests in a give composition

Balance & Rhythm

Balance and rhythm work together to create works of design that pulse with life, achieving both stability and surprise.

Endless Rhythm 1934 by Robert Delaunay

Design Principle: Figure & Ground

Figure & Ground is the interplay between shapes/planes/lines/points and a background. The human brain is wired to seek out graphic elements that is perceives as foreground and background. This perceived relationship is referred to as Figure and Ground. Even if a shape is on a white page, our brain perceives the shape as the Figure, and the white page as the Ground.

Figure & Ground is also referred to as positive and negative space.

Compositions are more energetic and interesting to look at when negative space/ground has a dynamic shape.

This composition is relatively boring:

While this one, which actually uses the same orange potato shape, is much more visually exciting:

Graphic Designers often seek a balance between figure and ground, using this relationship to bring energy and order to form and space. They build contrasts between form and counter-form in order to construct icons, illustrations, logos, compositions, and patterns that stimulate the eye. Creating figure/ground tension or ambiguity adds visual energy to an image or mark. Even subtle ambiguity can invigorate the end result and shift its direction and impact.

Graphic Design the New Basics

Stable

Reversible

Ambiguous

You can have a lot of fun with this:

Design
Principle:
Framing

Framing is everywhere. A picture frame sets off a work of art from its surroundings, bringing attention to the work and lifting it apart from its setting. Cropping, borders, margins, and captions are key resources of graphic design

Margin

Bleed

Partial Bleed

Margins provide a protective frame around the contents of a composition. They also provide space for information such as page numbers and running heads. Wider margins can emphasize a picture or a field of text as an object, calling our attention to it. Narrower margins can make the content seem larger than life, bursting at its own seams

Bleeds An image "bleeds" when it runs off the edges of a page. The ground disappears, and the image seems larger and more active. An image can bleed off one, two, or three sides. The photograph reproduced here is the same scale in each instance, but its intimacy and impact change as it takes over more or less of the surrounding area.

Image and Text An image seen alone, without any text, is open to interpretation. Adding text to a picture changes its meaning. Text and image combine in endless ways. Text can be subordinate or dominant to a picture; it can be large or small, inside or outside, opaque or transparent, legible or obscure. Text can respect or ignore the borders of an image. Putting type on top of high–contrast image poses legibility conflicts. Framing the text with boxes, bars, and transparent color fields are some of the ways designers deal with the problem of separating text from image.

Design Principle: Visual Hierarchy

A primary purpose of Graphic Design is to communicate information, and visual hierarchy is the primary principle for organizing information

• Hierarchy is the order of importance within a group or composition. Hierarchical order exists in nearly everything we know, including the family unit, the workplace, politics, and religion.
• Hierarchy is expressed through naming systems: general, colonel, corporal, private, or first, second, third, or top, middle, bottom. Hierarchy is conveyed visually through variations in scale, value, color, spacing, placement, and other signals.
• Hierarchy can be simple or complex, rigorous or loose, flat or highly articulated. Regardless of approach, hierarchy employs clear marks of separation to signal a change from one level to another.

Strong visual hierarchies guide visual and logical progression by showing what's important.

Weak visual hierarchies provide little or no guidance about what is important.

Emphasis is used to establish visual hierarchy. There are several means to achieve emphasis:

• Isolation

• Placement

• Scale

• Contrast

• Direction & Pointers

• Diagrammatic Structures

Design Principle: Layers

Layers are simultaneous, overlapping components of an image or sequence. They are at work in countless media software programs, from Photoshop and Illustrator to audio, video, and animation tools, where multiple layers of image and sound (tracks) unfold in time.

• Layers can be opaque or transparent, or conform to the shape of the layered object
• Layers are essentially the determination of what is of front of or in back of what

Design Principle: Transparency

Any surface in the physical world is more or less transparent or opaque. In a composition transparency is only established by its context within layering.

• A transparent circle only appears transparent when it's layered over another object

Transparency is powerful design principle. Transparency can serve to emphasize values of directness and clarity through adjustments and juxtapositions that maintain the wholeness or legibility of elements. Transparency also can serve to build complexity by allowing layers to mix and merge together. Transparency can be used thematically to combine or contrast ideas, linking levels of content. When used in a conscious and deliberate way, transparency contributes to the meaning and visual intrigue of a work of design.

Design Principle: Unity

Design Unity is the conceptual framework that allows the individual elements of a design to be perceived as a whole. This is also sometimes known as gestalt, German for "form," which places an emphasis on the perception of forms as organized wholes. Our brains are programmed to think this way, to seek out order, make connections, and to seek a whole by grouping commonalities.

The Unifying Laws of Perceptual Organization

Similarity
Elements that share characteristics are perceived as belonging together.

Proximity
Elements near each other are perceived as belonging together.

Continuity
Elements appear as a continuation of a previous element. Often implies motion.

Closure
The mind's tendency to connect element to complete a form, unit, or pattern.

Common Fate
Elements are perceived as a unit if they move in the same direction.

Continuing Line
Lines are perceived as following the simplest path. If two lines break, the viewer sees the overall movement rather than the break.

Visual Correspondence

The repetition of a visual element across a composition or set of formats.

Correspondence is the handling of design elements to create similarities of form used to create a family resemblance in a given composition.

Structure and Unity

Grids & Alignment

Probably the single most significant thing you can do to unify and clean up a design, is to make things line up.

Exercise 02: Rhythm & Balance

Description