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.