Concept Wizards - Unique Concepts of Unique Customers

Creating Emphasis through Isolation

Justin Lemaire

Another quick and easy way that you can create emphasis in a certain graphic would be through the use of a concept known as isolation. Isolation is pretty simple and if you think about it in purely theoretical terms, it is actually really the same thing as contrast. If you understand contrast well, then isolation is simply contrast with object positioning within the overall graphic.

When you consider a basket of fruit that is seven apples and one orange, the eye is drawn to the orange because of the focal point created through contrast. However, if the orange is turned into an apple, then there is no focal point for the image. If that apple is then moved away from the basket and placed at the other end of the drawing, the focal point returns once again because one apple is isolated from the other seven and that one apple then provides a position contrast which in turn creates the emphasis necessary for a sustained focal point within the image.

Isolation is a particularly useful technique to use in graphic design, because when you are designing banners or logos you can create contrast through positioning in order to create brands that are far more recognizable. In the internet world where information buzzes across a reader’s eyes in seconds, isolation is a great way to make them stop and pay attention.

Placement and Emphasis

Justin Lemaire

While emphasis can be quite easily created through the use of contrast or isolation, there are many times when neither of these types of methods will be appropriate. While contrast might be something you can get away with in the case of drawing or imaging different people, there is a much better and stylish way for you to create emphasis when people are in the picture.

This method, known as placement, simply has to do with where you place the figure in the graphic that you create. Because people can easily relate to other people when they see them in paintings and images, what you have a person look at in the image almost automatically becomes the focal point for the entire image. The more people percentage wise in the painting that are looking at the same point, the more that point becomes the focal point for the entire painting.

For example, consider an image with two people in it. In this image, the people are seated at desks on either side of the canvas, staring up at a wall clock that is in between and above them. That wall clock automatically becomes the focal point of image, partially because of its placement at the centre, but more so because of the human gazes that are directed in its direction.

Using Contrast to Create Emphasis

Justin Lemaire

When you are designing graphics or creating pictures, one of the most important concepts that you are ever going to need to understand is the concept of emphasis. There are many ways that artists can attract attention to a particular part of a designed graphic and one way to do it is through the use of emphasizing a particular part of the graphic. The emphasized part is known as the focal point because the drawing or graphic is created in such a way as that point becomes the natural focus for a person’s gaze.

There are many different ways to create emphasis, one of them being the use of contrast. Contrast is simply making one part of a painting obviously different from the rest of it. The eye will be drawn to that difference, making it a focal point for the entire graphic.

There are many ways to create this contrast. One is through positioning (horizontal versus vertical), while others include shape, elemental nature (regular versus irregular elements in a graphic design), value (light versus dark) and colour. Creating differences in these elements of design will allow you to create emphasis through the use of contrast, something that will allow you to enhance some of your designed graphics.

More Advanced Forms of Balance: Informal and Radial Balance

Justin Lemaire

Once you have mastered the art of creating formal balance in your images (and really for the most part it is not really that difficult), you can start taking a look at more advanced forms of balance to incorporate into your graphic designs. Two other types of balance that you can create in your graphic designs are informal balance and radial balance.

Informal balance, simply put, is balance that is created in an image without the use of symmetry. If this seems counter-conceptual to you, then consider the case of a weigh scale. If you put a brick weighing one kilogram into each side of the brick, then the weigh scale will stay level. If you remove one of the bricks, the side that still has the brick will sink lower. However, if you add ten bricks each weighing 0.1 kilograms, then the scale will level once again. In other words, balance does not need to be achieving by two of the same thing; it can also be achieved by multiple small objects on one part balancing out a large object on another. This can also be achieved through colour and greyscale value as well.

Radial balance is a different beast altogether. Radial balance occurs when you have a single focal point which has radiating images pushing out from it. A kaleidoscope image might have radial balance, as would a picture of the sun drawn as a circle with rays pushing outward from it. Radial balance can be combined with formal balance and the two are often present in an image at the same time.

Creating Balance in Your Images: Formal Balance

Justin Lemaire

One of the most important elements that you need to pay attention to when you are working on your graphic design images is balance. Balance refers to the ability of one part of the image that you create to balance out another part of the image in the eye of the beholder. This could mean anything from a balance in shape to a balance in colour or value. This is not to say that balance always needs to be a priority (i.e. a lack of balance in a picture could signify movement, which we have already discussed), but knowing how to do it is something that could prove useful to you in the long run.

The most obvious way to create balance is through using symmetry within your image. This type of balance is known as formal balance, called such because of the fact that you are actually creating balance in an image by making both sides of the image exactly mirror images of each other. Consider a building such as a church that is completely symmetrical and then think about a photograph of this particular building. If you cut that photograph down the middle with a pair of scissors, you would have two halves that would mirror each other. This picture is in balance and what’s more it is in formal balance.

Formal balance is the easiest type of balance to maintain within an image and thus it should be the type of balance you start with when you decide to tackle this particular concept.

Raster Images

Justin Lemaire

While vector images are certainly important to every graphic designer, they do not represent the whole story. Vector images breakdown when you try to use them for things that are continuous and for that reason something else is needed. You need something that has an inherently continuous design and that something is a raster image.

Raster images are completely different from vector images. Whereas vectors are made up of points, lines and polygons, raster images are instead made up of pixels. A pixel, short for picture element, represents a small part of a larger grid that makes up a raster image. When you take a look at the resolution on your monitor, what you are actually looking at is a reading of the pixel count across the horizontal of your monitor and across the vertical. Multiplying these two figures together gives the total overall resolution of your monitor (or of a picture, incidentally enough), which is usually measured in millions of pixels (i.e. Megapixels).

Most of the basic photo programs will do things in terms of raster, simply because it is easier for most people to think in terms of continuous grids. To prove this to yourself, open up a random image in paint and look at the coordinates that you can point your cursor at. These coordinates show where you are within the raster grid that is being used to represent the picture to the computer.

Creating Movement through Rhythm

Justin Lemaire

Here is the last in my instalment of the creation of motion in pictures. Like any other work of art in drama or music, paintings and graphics have a rhythm to them. Whether a person that created it knows it or not is another question entirely, but in their theoretical forms these things definitely have a real rhythm to them.

There are many ways that you can create a rhythm to your graphic, but the rhythm of the graphic will also help inform the movement that the graphic projects. For example, if you think back to the post about optical movement, what you will find is that in optical movement you create a flowing rhythm that forces the eye to go from one element of the graphic to the next. This is a flowing movement that can infer movement in the figures within the flow as well. However, you can also create rhythm by abruptness within your graphic just as quick bursts of sharp noise might indicate movement within a symphony or musical movement.

Creating movement through the use of colour is another example of rhythm, because sharp contrasts in colours can imply movement through the colours that stand out and attract the eye. The use of different background colours in different areas and then the use of those same colours within a figure can create a graphical rhythm born from a colour scheme that in the end creates movement as well.

There are many different ways to create movement and a good graphic designer will experiment with all of them in the process of creating their masterpieces.

Vector Images

Justin Lemaire

We’ve done such a great job giving ourselves a crash course in many of the elements of graphic design that are absolutely important to understand, so for a couple of posts let’s take a break and consider some of the image types that you will be working with in your graphic design career. One image type that is relatively well known is the vector image and there is a very easy way to identify this image; the patterns that you find in it are discrete.

That’s right, absolutely everything that you see in a vector image can be broken down into one of three constituent units: points, lines and polygons. While some parts of a vector image might look like they are continuous, if you break them down you will see that they are all combinations of single points, multiple-point lines and multiple-line polygons. Vector images are great when you want to display something in a discrete sense (such as a person), but they are not that great when you want to display something in a continuous sense (for example, a colour chart showing the rainfall totals in a particular area).

Vector images are things we’ll be visiting again and again in the future, but this little teaser will acquaint you with their existence.

Conveying Movement through Illusion

Justin Lemaire

Okay, so the title is a bit of a misnomer since all of the movement that is conveyed through a picture is conveyed through illusion because of the nature of taking something that is three dimensional and trying to recast it into a two dimensional setting. But when I say illusion, this time what I am referring to is an optical illusion.Optical illusions such as the ones that you see on different kaleidoscopic creations are illusions that can do a number of different things, but one of the things that they almost always do is convey motion of some kind. Whether that motion is wholly different from what the picture is actually doing or whether that motion is an implied afterthought, the whole purpose of an optical illusion is to make you see something that isn’t there and therefore in a sense almost by definition lends itself to motion in some way.

The main problem with optical illusions is that they are difficult to draw and for that reason are not good starting points for people that would like to work with movement. These in fact should be the last things you tackle in your quest to add movement to your designs simply because creating a perfect optical illusion can take more time for an inexperienced designer than the end result is often worth.

Conveying Movement through Outlines

Justin Lemaire

There are three distinct ways that you can use outlining techniques in order to create a sense of movement in the graphics that you create.

The first way is through the use of fuzzy outlines when you are creating the particular graphic design. When an object is moving extremely quickly, our eyes tend to look at it in a fuzzy way. For example, a supersonic jet that flies overhead really quickly might be perceived in this way, as might a train just at the moment when it enters the station at top speed. Utilizing this same conception in fuzzy outlining of pictures can give them the appearance of movement.

Another way to convey movement through outlining is to actually outline multiple positions for the same shape. This can show a series of movements through which that shape has gone and in that way you can also convey movement in a static context. A good example of this would be drawing three or four different images of a man in different stages of doing a push up in order to illustrate the movement required to do one.

The last method is known as optical movement and it is simply the process of forcing the eye to move around the picture and in doing so perceive an implied motion inherent to the thing being examined. Creating curves in a figure going in the direction that you want that figure to travel is a good way to accomplish optical movement in a graphic.