Understanding the Principles of Design

Hello everybody! In this video we're going to talk about the principles of design. The principles of design arrange the elements of art into a composition. So if you watched my previous video on the elements of art, you would have heard that the elements of art are a lot like the ingredients of a recipe. Well, the principles of design are like the instructions or the directions for a recipe. So you might have all the ingredients, but that doesn't mean you know what to do with them. And that's where the principles of design come in. You might ask yourself, I don't even know what a composition is. Well, I'm here to tell you, don't worry. Composition is the way an artwork is arranged. So basically it's where everything is placed in an artwork and in what manner. So there are a few compositional tools that we can use. Actually there's a lot of them, but the biggest ones that we talk about would happen to be the rule of thirds. So here we have an image by the master printer Hokusai, and we're going to use this image to describe the rule of thirds. Perhaps you may have noticed in your camera, when you're trying to shoot a picture, sometimes you see the little grid of lines that appear on your picture, kind of like this. Well, what you are seeing when that shows up is the rule of thirds. So for example, in the rule of thirds, we state that objects of interest should fall into these sort of intersecting areas of the grid. And these intersections are generally going to be a lot more interesting compositionally than something smack dab in the center. So if we look at the image by Hokusai, we see the largest part of the wave breaking over this intersection point. We see the mountain near this intersection, another section of wave at this intersection. So we notice that the movement of the piece kind of carries it through in this sort of grid-like fashion. And that's just one way of looking at composition. There's also the golden ratio and all kinds of other compositional elements, but we're going to keep it simple with just talking about the rule of thirds to show us a little bit about composition. So now that we know about composition, we can start talking about the principles of design. So the first principle that we're going to talk about is movement. So movement is the path that the viewer's eye takes through an artwork, and it's often to the areas of focus. So a lot of time, movement can be directed along lines or edges. So if we look at this picture here, we can see these sort of lines of the stairwell kind of moving us through in sort of a spiral fashion through the composition. The edges of the stair and these sorts of shapes also help direct us kind of into this focal area. You can also see these shapes too kind of pulling us in from the edges of the piece all towards this center area. We can also use colors, shapes, and other elements to help us move our eye through an image. The next element we're going to talk about is balance, and what that means is the visual weight of each element is distributed in a way that makes the composition feel stable. So what that means is you could think of your artwork as an actual scale. So let's talk about the different types of balance. First, we have symmetrical balance. So if you think of the word symmetry, symmetry is when things are the same. So symmetrical balance, the artwork could be divided in half and both sides would look the same. So here we have a couple examples of symmetrical artworks. In the picture of Kerry James Marshall, it's almost like when you put lots of paint together on a sheet and fold it in half and pull it apart, it's the same on both sides. He just continued to add a little bit extra to it. And then if we look at the Brooklyn Bridge, very symmetrical if you stand in the middle of it. Asymmetrical balance is a different type. So when we add the prefix A onto something, it means not. So asymmetrical means it's not symmetrical. It's a type of balance in which the two sides of the artwork are different, but they still feel stable. So this one's a little harder to explain because it's not so visually apparent. But if we look at these two images here, we can feel that they, you know, are well composed. The composition is interesting, but it doesn't feel like it's lopsided by any means. So if we look at this photograph by Sebastiao Salgado, we still have a lot of like movement in the piece and it brings your eye kind of throughout the composition. Even though it's heavier over here with people, the large intensity of the landscape here kind of helps balance out the people. Whereas in this abstract photograph by Paul Strand, he is balancing out light and shadow using just different values and then also different shapes that are sort of cut in. So if we were to kind of put in that, you know, rule of thirds here, there'd be points of interest kind of where we see these lines falling. So that's going to make it more interesting. Our next element of art is unity. So unity can also be called harmony. It's another term. And that would be when we use similar or repeated elements in an artwork to create consistency. So we might see repeated marks or a similar mood or repeated colors or kind of a consistent theme throughout the artwork. So here we have an image by Romare Bearden. And although it may seem very chaotic with all these different sized people and images kind of collage together throughout the piece, he's still using unity because he's got unity in the material and that it's all collage. There are similar values throughout. So there's a lot of kind of medium gray values that kind of drag through the image. We see repetition in the people throughout the image as well. So he's using a variety of different things, but they're all tied together with similar values and subject matter throughout. Now that leads us to the opposite of unity, which is variety. So where unity seeks to bring things together by being similar, variety instead uses many different elements. And when we use different elements, it helps us create interest or contrast in an artwork. The artist collective Meow Wolf makes some pretty insane sort of adventurous installations in the southwestern United States. So let's look at this image right here. We can see a variety of colors. There's kind of a cacophony of color, if you will. There's also a variety of shapes. We see lots of geometric shapes. We see more organic shapes happening. There's variety in the textures that we're seeing as well. And we also see kind of just a variety of subject matter even as we're looking through this. So this shows a lot of different elements all being put together to create a lot of interest. Our next principle of design is rhythm. And rhythm would be repeating elements in order to create a feeling of organized movement. So if you think about rhythm, usually we think of music, we think of a beat, right? So generally when we think of rhythm in art, it also kind of gives us sort of a feeling of a beat to it almost. So if we look at Marcel Duchamp descending this stairwell here, he is repeating himself over and over and over and over again as he moves down. And so we get this feeling of motion of him kind of moving throughout. And that repetition of him going down creates sort of like a rhythm as he's moving. If we look at Aboriginal art, there is a lot of rhythm to it. You can almost feel it pulsing with energy with these different size dots. So there's tiny ones, medium, big ones. Some of them have outlines around them, which gives them sort of an energy. And we would consider that rhythm. Similar to rhythm is pattern in that we're still talking about repetition. So that would include a repeated design. We see patterns all around us. Some of my favorite artists that use pattern would be Gustav Klimt and Lena Iris Victor. They do actually have kind of similar patterns throughout these paintings. So here we can see kind of the repeated eye shape within a triangle. Up the dress, there's repeated triangles here, repeated squares, swirly circles, little checkers, sort of like halved circle shapes. So there's lots and lots of patterns going on in this painting. Same with over here, like lots of repetitive concentric circles and chevron sort of designs, triangles, lines. So pattern can be used to create interest, and it can also be used to help unify an image by repeating things. All right, now we're going to kind of move away from repetition and talk more about size. So the next two principles of design involve size. Scale tells us about the comparison of one object to another in terms of size. So here we'll look at two examples of size. If we look at this painting of Yosemite, we see the scale of the animals here compared to the massive rock formations in the background. And that gives us kind of an idea of how big these mountains are compared to the animals or vice versa. And if we look at this giant rubber ducky by Florentine Hoffman, here we're seeing an example of exaggerated scale. So he's taking something that is normally quite small, which is a rubber ducky, and then blowing it up to a massive scale to kind of show some contrast. And it makes it much more attention-grabbing when we're exaggerating scale. A similar element is proportion. So proportion and scale are very, very similar. Scale, remember, talks about comparing one thing to another thing, so two separate things, right? Proportion is more of a ratio. So when we talk about proportion, we're comparing parts of a whole in terms of size. So if you think of a ratio, you might think like one-third or, you know, one to two that sort of thing. Generally, what helps me remember that proportions are about parts of a whole is I think about facial proportions. So I'm comparing part of my face to another part of my face. As we can see in like these Leonardo da Vinci drawings, he's dividing up the face into sections and kind of comparing sizes throughout to figure out where facial features belong on the face. And like I showed you the rubber ducky with exaggerated scale, here we're going to see some exaggerated proportions in these sculptures by Gerardo Feldstein. So here, you know, he's clearly exaggerating these feet, making them really massive compared to the rest of the body. So he is using proportions because the feet are a part of the body, which is the whole, right? So we're comparing parts of a whole. Emphasis is just like when you emphasize a word, it's the same in art. Emphasis is what we focus on, on an artwork, and it's usually the largest or most detailed area. So when we look at these images here in this painting by Ben Grosso, we want to see what grabs your attention right away. What's the first thing you see? That will be the emphasis. So for me, I would have to say it's probably the light of the explosion happening at the center of this building. Or if we look at René Magritte, obviously by making the head detached from the body and also spherical and orange, he is emphasizing this really large shape here as evidenced by the size and the color and kind of the context in that it doesn't quite make sense. So when we think about context of things not really fitting in, we could talk about contrast. Anytime we talk about contrast, think of like comparing and contrasting something, we talk about difference. So contrast is the amount of difference between elements. And we have a few different types of contrast. So we could talk about contrast between color or lines or shapes or values or textures, but we're going to talk more specifically about value contrast because there are a few more terms that fit with it. So value contrast obviously would be the amount of difference between values. So having light and dark, right? If you remember from the elements of art, value is the lightness or darkness of something. So there are two types of value contrast that we're going to talk about. There's high contrast and low contrast. So what's the difference between the two? Well, high contrast means there's a large difference between the lightest and darkest areas. The edges tend to look harder when you have a big difference between light and dark values. So for example, black and white are opposite values. So generally when you see things that are like very stark black and white, that would be high contrast. Low contrast is the opposite. So there's not much difference between the lightest and darkest areas, which tends to make the edges look softer. So for example, we might have values that are similar to each other, you know, maybe middle grays, or maybe they're all light values or all dark values. So when your values are really close to one another and similar, it's going to not jump out at you quite so much. It's going to be a little more subtle when you look at it. So the image on the left here is actually a close-up of a human iris, which is kind of freaky when you think about it a little too much. But if we look at this image, it shows a great example of high contrast. So here we see super dark black, which would be our darkest value, and that is right next to some bright whites. So when the bright whites are right next to the super dark blacks, those are going to kind of pop at you more because they're so different from one another. And that is what will create high contrast. Whereas if we look at this image by Yanturu, it's all kind of similar values in that these sort of yellows and mauves and oranges, they're all pretty close to one another in value, kind of all in the middle. So this image would be more of an example of low contrast, when the values are close to one another. Now, the next and final type of contrast, and the last thing I'm going to talk about today, is juxtaposition. And juxtaposition is probably one of my favorite words. Unfortunately, it's very overplayed in the art world, but just look at that word. Think of all the Scrabble points you can get. I almost spelled that word in Scrabble the other day, and it was magical. I had juxtapo. So close. Or halfway there. I mean, it's super close anyway. That would have been like a million Scrabble points. But okay, sorry, getting distracted about words. But juxtaposition is combining two or more unlike things to show contrast. It's one of my favorite things because it can often be very funny, or it can be startling. And usually juxtaposition tends to grab your attention because it's showing such very different things put together. So let's look at this example of some really interesting architecture. So we're seeing a juxtaposition of old and new. And we also see a juxtaposition of material. So we have like this old stone facade of the building here juxtaposed with the sleek metal and glass of this new building. So we're juxtaposing material, we're juxtaposing sort of the idea of it, you know, like I said, old and new. We're also juxtaposing shape. So you know, this is very stoic and, you know, strong looking, whereas this side of the building is super futuristic. It's almost like a crystal that's grown from the ground. So very, very different in a lot of different elements. But all in all, those would be the principles of design. So hopefully learning about them will help you better be able to understand artwork as you were looking at it and as you're creating it. Thanks for watching!