An Intermediate Guide to Formal Visual Design
by Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming

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 specialized 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 formalized 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 Old 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 technophile 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 popularization 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 art bots.

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 diminishing perspective can imply a point. In conceptual terms a point may refer to a specifically emphasized 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.

Shape
Shapes are distinct, contiguous areas of visual information. Shapes can be defined in terms of positive space (draw a triangle) or negative space (an anti-triangle shape is rendered in the white space surrounding the triangle when I draw a triangle). Emphasizing incidental shapes in an image helps to raise the level of abstraction, drawing the viewer's attention away from the literal forms depicted and focusing instead on their more geometric and aesthetic qualities.

The structure of common shapes lends them cross-cultural connotations drawn from the way similar shapes behave in the real world. For example, an inverted pyramid contains a far greater degree of built-in visual tension than a non-inverted one, because in the real world the former is as precarious as the latter is stable. Similarly, shapes that converge toward the top appear to be ascending and shapes that converge toward the bottom appear to be descending, because of the way these shapes mimic the effects of optical perspective distortion in the real world.

Mass
In most visual media, with the clear exception of sculpture and midget throwing, mass is implied rather than actual. Manipulating the apparent mass of an image creates illusions of depth, volume and weight. In general, darkness lends more mass than lightness; areas of visual tension weigh more than relaxed regions.

Space
The relationship between visually complex regions and visually stark regions has a profound impact on the composition's sense of weight and balance. On the surface space is simply the opposite of mass, but the relationship is in fact more subtle: beyond the literal spatial relationships of the visual components arranged in the image plane there is also implied space or imaginary volumes created through illusion. This space, while virtual, can be as impactful as actual space in the mind of the viewer.

Change
This element is often needlessly broken down into sub-components such as time, motion and transition. The common spirit is one or more attributes of an element differing across time. The change can be actual, as in the case of motion graphics and animation, or the change can be virtual, implied by something as simple as "motion lines" in comic book illustrations. The principles of tempo and rhythm guide the application of change.

One of the best examples of using subtle (but actual) change to create a hypnotic effect is the renowned painting La Joconde (also known as the Mona Lisa) by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo pioneered a new oil painting technique in that work by using dozens of layers of semi-transparent applications of glaze and paint to build up the image: the effect is one of exceedingly subtle depth, leading to the eerie feeling that there is a woman trapped inside of the picture plane with eyes that follow the viewer around the room when they move.

The change in the painting is almost undetectable, but it is unanticipated and can be very disquieting. (Naturally, the effect cannot be captured by conventional photography, thus leading millions of people over the years to wonder just what the hell is so special about that lady's smile.)

My personal favorite work that embodies the notion of represented (as opposed to actual) change is Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendu une escalier, (also known as Nude Descending a Staircase #2) a painting which depicts several seconds of quick motion as a rhythmic smear.

Value
Value is a measure of the brightness of an image. Value can be used in a very formal, abstract way (darkness is heavier than lightness, so value can be manipulated to balance a composition), as a narrative device (to connote ethereal versus earthy characteristics), or simply as a tool for emphasis (look here).

Hue
Color is one of the most accessible elements of design, in that it is the element most often claimed by fluff-brained amateurs to be well within the range of their intuitive expertise. This is true in some rare circumstances; it is more usual for color to be badly managed by the well-meaning boob.

The basis of any color system is its Primary Colors. The exact hues vary depending on the medium: televisions (RGB), oil paints (RYB) and advertising posters (CMY) each use different primary colors. Common to all is the fact that primary colors cannot be created through mixing in a given system, and are equidistant when represented on a color wheel (where chroma is represented as a value in degrees between 1 and 360, expressing the entire spectrum available (or gamut) within a given system).

Colors diametrically opposite one another on a color wheel are known as Complementary Colors (contrary to popular belief this term does not mean "colors that look good together"). In many familiar color-spaces red is the complement of green: this means, among other things, that red looks redder when surrounded by green, red can be shaded by mixing with green, and that staring at red and then looking at a neutral field will cause the optical illusion of seeing green. Complementary colors can be used to accent one another (via juxtaposition) or to subdue one another (via intermixing).

Analogous Colors are three hues that are adjacent to one another on a color wheel such as blue, blue-green and green. A good color scheme often consists of two sets of analogous hues, and one set of opposing complementary analogous hues based on the average hue of the two sets on the other side of the wheel.

For terminology fans:

A "tint" is a given hue with added white.

A "tone" is a given hue with added black.

A "shade" is a given hue with added complement.

Colors have psychological connotations, in great part influenced by their real world expressions. Green, for instance, is perceived as lush and vibrant due to an association with flora, and blue is perceived as open and serene due to an association with clear skies. Red is the most primal color, linked with deep reactions in the limbic system in the brain; cultures with only one word for distinguishing hues from black or white invariably identify red, cultures with two words identify red and green, cultures with three words identify red, green and yellow, and so forth in a predictable pattern of cumulative complexity. Cultures that can identify violet and indigo are considered to be sophisticated in terms of color differentiation; cultures that can identify taupe are just pretentious.

Media
As we acknowledge that a point is not a point of mathematical precision or that a line is really a smear of graphite of finite width on paper, we must also take into account the effect the medium we are using has on the image we are creating with it. The media can be relevant through actual visual traits (quality of the paper/videowall/filmstock from which the work is viewed), illusory traits (impressions of glossiness or coarseness created through artifice), contextual traits (a farm scene painted on a wooden panel gives a different impression than a farm scene rendered out of neon tubes), and tactile traits (the actual feel of the materials used in sculpture, art installations and industrial design).

Type
Despite the fact that typefaces are compound visual objects they play such a significant role in visual design that they are considered to be an element unto themselves. The mastery of typography is a refined and subtle art covering an array of skills whose depth and dullness is beyond the scope of this article. Scale Frequently and mistakenly mixed-up with ratio, a principle of design; scale is one of the most basic building blocks for framing how the viewer will perceive a work.

For instance, a finger-sized figurine of the Hamburglar has a distinctly different feeling than one thirty stories tall. Similarly, viewing an encyclopedia thumbnail of Michelangelo's David makes a different impression than standing at the foot of the superhuman-sized original.

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