Page 72 - Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals

3.3 Compositional Principles — Strategies for Arranging Things Better

Alex Hass

We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know.
Loud, messy, cluttered, busy. These words. . . express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content on
a screen or page. We need them to express how unpleasant a user experience it is to not know where to direct
our attention next. (Porter, 2010, para 1)

If everything is equal, nothing stands out. (Bradley, 2011)

The proper composition of visual elements generates not only visual stability, it enhances mood through
composition and generates order that prevents visual chaos. Designers use compositional rules in their
work to make the reader enter their work and experience a design environment that is calm yet exciting,
quiet yet interesting. A magazine designer, for example, creates a grid and applies an order to the
typographic elements creating a comprehensible hierarchy. This design system is interpreted in different
ways, in pages and spreads, issue after issue. If the organizational system is versatile and planned with
thought and depth, it can be used to produce unique and exciting layouts that remain true to the rules
determined for the overall system initially designed. Organizational principles create a framework for
design without determining the end results.

Compositional rules can be used to generate content as well as organize it. The Bauhaus artist and
designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy created a series of paintings by calling in a set of instructions to a sign
painter using the telephone. Here is his account of the experience, written in 1944:

In 1922 I ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in porcelain enamel. I had the factory’s color
chart before me and I sketched my paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone, the factory
supervisor had the same kind of paper divided in to squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct
position. (It was like playing chess by correspondence). (Moholy-Nagy, 1947, p. 79)

Designing visual elements into a strong composition is a complex endeavour on its own, but increasingly
designers are being asked to create vast compositional systems that other people will implement. Much
like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, designers need to be able to make strong compositional systems and also
convey how their systems work, how to apply their rules, and how to apply them so they retain a relevant
freshness.

Alignment

Figure 3.17 Alignment

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