An Intermediate Guide to Formal Visual Design

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An Intermediate Guide to Formal Visual Design

By Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming
http://mfdh.ca

The varied and sundry digital revolutions of the last thirty years have empowered many regular people to create the kinds of media that had heretofore been the exclusive domain of trained professionals with expensive proprietary hardware and specialised knowledge.

In part this has resulted in a profound empowerment of creative users to express themselves in powerful new ways; largely, however, it resulted in the wide exposure of a whole lot of really, really bad visual design by amateur clods.

Whether you are an enthusiastic user of these new technologies who would like to improve your skills through a better understanding of the formalised elements and principles of design your fly-by-night "digital design school" located above a convenience store may have failed to teach you, or if you are just a regular person who would like to sneer and poke fun at the ocean of bad design that surrounds us in a more intelligent and informed manner, this is the article for you.



The beginning of the end for the elite design professional came when the Desktop Publishing Revolution of the nineteen-eighties first gave the average inexperienced ignoramus power over the domain of print, giving rise to things like corporate newsletters printed entirely in Olde English majuscules and wedding invitations with enough mixed typefaces to pass as ransom demands.

Next came the Desktop Video Revolution of the nineteen-nineties which put broadcast-quality expressive power in the hands of the regular user. As the reach of the average personal computer increased this wave of new, cheap video artists moved quickly from the technophiliac loner in his basement with a VideoToaster to the rows upon rows of gleaming, underpowered G4s that lace today's mid-range creative production houses. Now any fool can make TV.

With the popularisation of the Internet the computer-using masses finally got their chance to become self-publishing content creators, breaking the final barrier between their imaginations and an audience potentially as wide as the web itself. This revolution (initially called The Information SuperHighway Revolution by idiots) was complete. Sensitive professional graphic designers who had killed themselves a decade earlier when the word "typeface" was replaced with "font" began spinning in their graves in disgruntled concert, knowing now that their trade had finally been irretrievably thrown to the dogs.

To intelligibly discuss why the products of these revolutions so often suck it is helpful to understand the formal elements and principles of visual design that are not underpinning them.

It is important not to mistake formalism for an argument that the creative act can be boiled down to a set of mechanical rules. Like all of the arts, visual design is a discipline comprised of a balance struck between intuition and formalism. I submit simply that work produced in complete ignorance of these formal principles is accidentally ill-formed far more often than it is accidentally well-formed.

By defining and briefly discussing the key concepts of formal visual design I hope to bring into the light a subject that is frequently obscured by the vague and slippery garbage of nonsense-spouting artbots.


THE ELEMENTS OF DESIGN

The elements of design are considered to be the atomic components of any visual work. They are formatted according to the principles of design, resulting in sound composition and good form.

Point
This is the most basic of elements, manifested in the material world with just slightly more gusto than a mathematical point (which is visually quite dull). In terms of actual media a point is a single mark from a pencil, a blob of paint, a pixel. In technical terms a point can be implied by diminishing perspective. In conceptual terms a point may refer to a specifically emphasised area or region of focus for the eye of the viewer.

Line
Lines can be literal, like the outline around a cartoon drawing, or incidentally formed by an edge, a shadow or an intersection of two objects. A line might be implied by a series of shapes arranged loosely along a linear or curved path. In a good composition lines often serve to connect the areas of emphasis in the image, giving the eye a pathway from one focal point to another.

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