Our design of the week will emphasize one of the main qualities of a good design: Balance. In every composition, one has to always worry about balance, or the lack of it. The latter will definitely kill a piece.
A lot of my designs lack balance. I upload them to Cafepress, only to find out much too late that they were not quite right.
I will say it again: I am just a beginning Graphic Artist. So, masterpieces are not going to roll out from here, any time soon. On top of that I am lazy. I want to speed up everything, and in the process, I forget to tighten all the corners.
Since I am creating t-shirts designs mostly, sometimes I don’t pay enough attention to the things I am doing. Every little simple text design should be treated like a million-dollar prize-winning piece, which in fact, it could be. It is rather easy to miss certain mistakes, because they are not readily apparent. But there is no excuse to let anything go out without being checked for balance. Even if you are always rushing like me.
We are so close to the monitor, that something may seem almost perfect, when it is utterly wrong. To prove this point, let us consider the first version of our design in figure 1. It is geometrically centered on the sheet, but for our purpose, it is not optically balanced. In our haste, we forgot that balance is not a synonym for symmetry. We sloppily applied the “align to center” function, and called it a day!
Balance is more about “visual weight” or “optical value”. If we had paused a bit, we could have noticed that in the first version, there is a big white space under the word “HAITI”. In order to make it look right, we would need about the same amount of white space on the the other side of the virtual diagonal (top left to bottom right). That would require moving the whole block down.
We have perfect balance, when we have the same amount of negative space on both sides of the piece. Negative space is the empty area around or within the composition. In this design, it is the white part. (The positive space is occupied by the graphic itself).
The best way I found to achieve balance, is to frame my piece as shown in figure 2, and adjust the alignment accordingly. With a dark frame like this (actually, the darker, the better), one can notice the pockets of negative space, more clearly.
I also have my “step back and wink” technique. It allows me to appreciate the “value” around the composition, so I can see how much “nudging” is necessary. To help me understand this “value” concept better, I call it the “amount of grayness”. When it is equally distributed, I know I have reached my goal.
For beginners like myself, this is not a difficult concept to grasp. We just have to remember to verify that everything is nice and balanced before we send it out. Some people go through some long troubleshooting lists, before wrapping everything up. Me, on the wall facing me, I have a big white circle on a black square. In the middle there is a drawing of an eye, to remind me to check my negative space, and to step back and wink. I do not need anything else, because if I have balance, I have everything.
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Blog post by Tatán
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