You can use additional characteristics to control visual weight.
You don’t have to limit yourself to the primitive features above.
Vertical objects appear heavier than horizontal objects. The irregularity gives the impression that mass has been removed from a regular shape. Objects with a regular shape appear heavier than objects with an irregular shape. Texture makes an element appear three-dimensional, which gives the appearance of mass and physical weight. Textured elements appear heavier than non-textured objects. Elements in the foreground carry more weight than elements in the background. The further from the center or dominant area of a composition, the greater the visual weight an element will carry. Red is considered the heaviest color and yellow the lightest.ĭark elements have more visual weight than light elements.Įlements located higher in the composition are perceived to weigh more than elements located lower in the composition. Warm colors advance into the foreground and tend to weigh more than cool colors, which recede into the background. Large elements have more visual weight than small elements. Let’s start with the primitive features that I mentioned in the last post: size, color, value, position, texture, shape and orientation. Below are some of the characteristics you can change on any element and a description of how changing them will either increase or decrease the element’s visual weight. It’s in the combination of features that your eye will help.įortunately, others have isolated and tested these characteristics. You can isolate each characteristic to know that something bigger weighs more than something smaller, for example. This doesn’t mean that you have to randomly try things and see what attracts your eye the most and the least. The areas of a composition that attract your eye are those that have greater visual weight. You use your experience and judgment to determine which elements have greater or lesser weight. There’s no way I know of to precisely measure the visual weight of a design element. To create elements of different visual weight, you would use different combinations of primitive features. Some combinations of features will attract the eye more than others. It’s not any one feature, but rather their combination that determines the visual weight of an element. The sum of these characteristics or primitive features is what determines an element’s visual weight. A large red object carries more visual weight than a small blue object. Red tends to attract the eye more than blue, and larger elements attract the eye more than smaller ones. In that post I mentioned how, through these features, you can show contrast and similarity between elements.įor example, contrasting elements by making one very big and the other very small makes it clear that the elements are different.Ĭontrolling the combination of these features is how you control visual weight.
Determine line direction using trimble terramodel series#
In the previous post in this series I talked about primitive features, or the intrinsic characteristics of an element, such as size, color and shape. The more an element attracts the eye, the greater its visual weight. Two-dimensional objects can attract attention. Visual weight is a measure of the force that an element exerts to attract the eye. Physical weight is a measure of the force that gravity exerts on an object, but two-dimensional objects (such as elements on a web page) don’t have mass and, therefore, don’t have any physical weight. “ Design Principles: Connecting and Separating Elements Through Contrast and Similarity”.“ Design Principles: Space and the Figure-Ground Relationship”.“ Design Principles: Visual Perception and the Principles of Gestalt”.You can find the first three posts in the series here: Note: This is the fourth post in a series on design principles. Both are important concepts to understand if you want to create hierarchy, flow, rhythm and balance in your composition. We refer to this force as visual weight and to the perceived direction of visual forces as visual direction. These forces also appear to act on other elements, imparting a visual direction to their potential movement and suggesting where you should look next. The greater the force, the more the eye is attracted. Every element on a web page exerts a visual force that attracts the eye of the viewer.
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