Visual Contrast

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来自 California Institute of the Arts 的课程

Fundamentals of Graphic Design

5428 个评分

California Institute of the Arts

Fundamentals of Graphic Design

5428 个评分

课程 1（共 5 门，Specialization 平面设计）

Graphic Design is all around us! Words and pictures—the building blocks of graphic design—are the elements that carry the majority of the content in both the digital world and the printed world. As graphic design becomes more visible and prevalent in our lives, graphic design as a practice becomes more important in our culture. Through visual examples, this course will teach you the fundamental principles of graphic design: imagemaking, typography, composition, working with color and shape... foundational skills that are common in all areas of graphic design practice. I don't just want you to watch a video of someone talking about design, I want you to MAKE design! If you want to be a designer you have to be a maker and a communicator, so this course will offer you lots of opportunities to get your hands dirty with exercises and with more practical projects. At the end of this course you will have learned how to explore and investigate visual representation through a range of image-making techniques; understand basic principles of working with shape, color and pattern; been exposed to the language and skills of typography; and understand and have applied the principles of composition and visual contrast. If you complete the course, along with its optional (but highly recommended) briefs, you will have a core set of graphic design skills that you can apply to your own projects, or to more deeply investigate a specialized area of graphic design. To succeed in this course you will need access to a computer. You can complete this course without one but it will be tougher. Access to, and a beginner's level knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite programs, such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign will help you, especially if you want to complete the optional briefs.

从本节课中

Week 3: Fundamentals of Shape and Color

This week we are going to look at how designers work with shape and color as their fundamental building blocks. You'll learn about visual contrast, color, rhythm and pattern in design. I'll be showing you the process involved in making an abstract design from shapes, and how to use that element to create a repeating pattern design. You'll be completing a quiz (required!) to make sure you understand how visual contrast and color work, and I also highly recommend you complete the two optional peer review assignments. In the first assignment you'll create your own simple and complex design motifs, and you'll use them as the central elements in designing a repeating pattern in the second assignment. The assignments are optional, but they are the place where you get to demonstrate and apply your formal skills, so well worth taking the extra time to complete!

Graphic Shapes2:56

Visual Contrast5:40

Marks, Icons, and Symbols3:25

Negative/Positive, Figure/Ground8:36

Working with Color5:01

The Color Wheel4:37

Mixing Color: Paint, Print and Screen6:31

与讲师见面

Michael Worthington
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art

Some of the ideas that we're going to look at concerning shape and

form and color are based on the principles from Johannes Itten who

was a teacher at the Bauhaus in the early 1920's.

And he developed a basic course or a foundation there that looked at shape and

form and color and composition in a way that hadn't really been done before.

It was a very modern way of looking at these ideas.

And he did it in a way that these basic principles applied to fine art,

and to industrial design, to graphic design, to a lot of different practices.

And these ideas from the Bauhaus about shape, form, color and composition.

Even though they're nearly a 100 years old now, they're still really the foundation

of contemporary design practice and contemporary design thinking.

The basis for the Bauhaus foundation was really to understand and

to control visual contrast.

Now, this can mean a lot of different things and

visual contrast can work in many different ways.

So we're going to try and break this apart, first of all, and

examine the different kinds of visual contrast that can work with shapes.

So the simplest visual contrast might just be the shape itself.

So you could have a simple form, such as this circle made out of a single line,

or you could have a much more complex form where it's non-geometric and

made up of a much more non-symetrical shape.

You could think about a contrast in scale between an object being large or

an object being small.

Another primary contrast would be how the object feels in space,

whether it's essentially a horizontal object or a vertical object, so

here you can see two rectangles, one feeling low and horizontal, and

the other high and vertical.

Similarly, you could also look at a much flatter shape and

think about it being narrow or broad or wide.

It's the same height, it's just actually wider.

Now these might seem like very, very basic ideas or very basic contrasts

between shapes, but I think, sometimes, there are things we take for granted.

So much so that sometimes we just forget about them and

don't even think about them or experiment with them.

So now if we take those flat, two-dimensional shapes and

try to look at them or think about them as three dimensional forms,

we have another contrast to think about.

We have their depth to think about.

So here you can see one form very shallow,

very little depth, the other form with much more depth.

So there's another contrast to think about.

As well as the physical or mathematical attributes to shapes that

can form contrasts, there are also aspects to shapes that

affect things like composition and how the viewer really sees the shape.

So for instance here, the long skinny rectangle placed at a diagonal

creates a sense of direction in the viewer's eye.

You tend to follow through that shape so you get a very strong diagonal movement

when you look at it, versus a square where perhaps it's much more static.

It's sitting on a solid horizonal baseline.

And because it's a geometric concentric shape,

it visually pulls you into the center of the square.

So just in terms of how you visually view these two objects,

you could describe one as being dynamic or moving, and the other as being static.

And this is gonna be very important later on when we look at composition.

And there can also be contrasts between the same shape.

So here we have two squares, but they appear totally different.

One being dark and one being lighter.

So just the color or

the tonality of the square can have an effect, can cause a visual contrast.

So we could also look at the shape itself.

One shape being very crisp and

the square being very vector based and feeling very computery.

And the other feeling much more, say pixel based, and softer.

So even though it's the same shape one becomes hard.

One becomes soft.

So another visual contrast that you could think about,

is to think about the relationship between things being light and things being heavy.

And here we can see this, this is partly shown in the shapes themselves.

The circle feels a little bit lighter.

But also because the square is filled in with a black color, it feels much heavier.

Also because it's on the bottom of this composition it feels heavier.

And the circle, because it's got a fuzzy outline, it's containing a white shape,

it definitely feels like it's a little bit lighter than the square.

And I feel like I cheated a little bit here by

putting the type on the light one at the top and

the heavy one at the bottom to accentuate the weight and the direction of each.

But basically these shapes, part of what's making them feel different

is the difference between being a shape that's described by a line, and

a shape that's described by volume.

And the volume obviously, when it's a contrasting color,

it's going to feel much, much heavier,

much more solid basically than an object that is being described by a line.

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