Project 3: Visual dynamics

Visual dynamics is the energy created by the arrangement of all your visual elements in a
composition. It is central to how much of graphic design works, creating the visual tensions
that draw the viewer into reading text, looking at posters and generally catching people’s
eye. Visual dynamics are inherent in all design, as soon as you have more than one element
on a page there’s going to be some pull and push between them, both in terms of their
visual appearance and their meaning. Colours can also produce energy, such as placing red
alongside green creating a strong visual dynamic in which the two colours appear to vibrate. Not all visual dynamics need to be this strong. You can use composition much more subtly, for example using the empty space of the page to help focus on key elements of your design. Visual dynamics can be used to give your designs impact or get people to look at the things you want them to look at.

Looking

To start thinking about visual dynamics you need to become aware of how your own eyes
work. This is culturally determined. If you have grown up in Britain reading English, for
example, you have learnt to read left to right, from the top left hand corner to the bottom
right, so the eye generally looks in that direction when text is involved. If you learnt to read
Arabic or Urdu, for example, your eye would have learned to read from right to left.
When looking at the world, our eyes move quickly to take in a broad view followed by
darting movements that start to fill in the picture with more details. We instinctively follow
the dynamics of what we’re looking at, if there’s a straight horizon, we scan it; if there are
windows we look at them rather than the wall surrounding them. Colourful objects and high
contrasts stand out; our eyes are always drawn to the elements that stand out.
We will always look at faces by focusing on the triangle between the eyes and mouth more
than the rest of the head in order to read expressions. Where possible we fill in the gaps, we
don’t look at every leaf of a tree, we look at a few, read the shape of the tree and assume all
the leaves look more or less the same. We might look at something with a quick glance,
study it over minutes or see it again and again over a period of time.

Composition, layering and hierarchy

Visual dynamics can be broken down into composition, layering and hierarchy.

Composition is where you place your various items within a space while hierarchy refers to
the order in which you read things. Composition usually functions within the edges of you
design. Whether it’s a book jacket, a magazine, poster or business card, there are edges to
work up to. You can exploit the edge of your page by having visual elements running off the
page, using it to crop images or to increase the white space.

The eye is used to seeing the world as a three-dimensional environment with lots of visual
clues to tell us whether an object is close up, far away, small or large. Optical illusions exploit these clues tricking the brain into thinking it is seeing something different.

Layering: In the predominantly flat world of graphic design we can create a visual dynamic
by layering visual elements, placing elements in the background, foreground and sitting
alongside each other. Layering creates a sense of depth, making elements feel closer or
further away. Layering visual elements lets the eye think it is looking into the distance or
seeing something close up, both of which helps give a level of priority.

Hierarchy: Creating a hierarchy in your designs should help regulate where a viewer’s eye
travels, directing them to look at key information before the less important details. This is
easily done with typography, creating larger or smaller text or changing the order in which
it’s read. Hierarchy might also refer to the information that you pick up on your first viewing and the more subtle elements that you only notice on your second or third look, very important if your design work is going to be viewed everyday by somebody.

Contrast

At the heart of visual dynamics is the idea of contrast; creating work that relies on dark and
light, small and large, empty and full, to create the visual push and pull that makes it feel
dynamic. Contrast can be created through the use of empty space as much as filling it with
visual elements. It might be a contrast between colours, space or proportion.

Research Point

Becoming aware of how you look at things is useful in understanding how best to construct
the visual dynamic of your own design work. Go back to your visual diary, how do your eyes
travel around the items you have collected? What do you look at first? Where is the contrast
in what you are looking at?

Kitten Designs

These designs simply use a picture of a kitten, the word kitten set in either white or black
and a pink block of colour. By adjusting the composition of the elements, increasing the size
of the text, image or block of colour and thinking about the hierarchy and layering, a
surprisingly broad range of designs can be created.

Exercise: See the light

Using only an image of a light bulb, the word ‘light bulb’ and a block of colour of your
choice create different designs that explore visual dynamics – as the kitten designs
shown in the previous project.

Think about your compositions, trying each element at a different sizes and cropping your
photo. Your block of colour can be any size, so use it fully to create a sense of space in
your composition. Think about layering your visual elements to create depth within your
designs and think about contrasts.

Use thumbnails to work out what sort of designs you might try. You can download and
use this lightbulb image (above) from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gluehlampe_01_KMJ.jpg and work on you
computer or photocopy the picture of the lightbulb and work on paper.

Be playful within the rules set, creating as many different designs as you can. Edit these
down to about 20 designs that you feel represent the breadth of different approaches
you have explored.

Exercise Response

I began sketching out some potential designs. I considered position, shape, colour and type. See sketches below:

Sketches

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I sketched the above with the intention of playing around, so didn’t feel the need to sketch the full lot of designs… It was time for some fun.

In the end I edited the light bulb to roughen it up and add more of an aged, industrial effect to the design.

My favourite colour is red, and in my head I had already envisaged my sketches in this colour. Red, black and white is always a great combination – Striking and clean. Red is also a warm colour, and therefore my choice to use it with a bulb felt justified.

Designs

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