When it comes to graphic design, Unity is also referred as Integration, meaning all the elements in the work appear to belong to each other, and make a whole of composition. This is a very basic and important goal of any graphic design work. Components in one design work are not supposed to compete with each other or hide from each other but rather support each other in a certain priority order to give a flow to the design to provide messages.
Type and images are two different kinds of elements in the design world, but equally important. Type comes up with words to tell the message in a direct and straightforward way, while picture gives people more space to portrait it to a certain meaning with their own interpretation. And when we put these two elements together into one work, the design gets sophisticated and being equipped more dimensions. In a lot of design works, types are placed in front of the picture and stands out from the background picture to give a clear view for the audience. However, there are also works that have type appeared more in an imagery way, by means of extreme dimension of the text and uncommon fonts, which are not so clear for the audience at the first sight to read text message. And in this kind of design, the image elements may in a major role of the work. However no matter which element takes the lead, unity is always the goal to put them together, in which case, type can convert to image and image can also be shown in a type way (just like the type mask we did). CONSISTENCY is one of the methods we use frequently to achieve the goal of unity, which include the consistency of color, style, alignment, etc. Color – we choose a color that appears in the picture (usually appears repeatedly) for the color of the type. Style – around the theme of story the design is telling, we choose the style of the picture and the font. Say, the design is telling a happy story, we may use a highly saturated color image with a cheerful-looking font. Besides that, POSITON is also a very important factor for a unity design. This involves with the concept in our previous topic – space. Usually for the type that is placed in front of the picture, we would choose to place it on the portion of the image that has less variety and more monotones, which is also referred as negative space. Type on negative space can get the effect of not only standing out of the picture but also integrate with it.
I believe there are more principles than the above ones I mentioned to create a unified design. However, the point is to achieve an integrated composition as we desired, multiple methods and principles need to be applied to one art work than just stick to one.
Tags: design, graphics |
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