Unit 2 Lecture 2 'Unity in Design'

Lecture 2-2 'Unity in Design'

What grabs your attention when you are driving down the road, walking in the city, or just reading a magazine? When you start to think about it, you begin to notice that we are constantly being accosted by designs meant to get our attention. We will tend to pay attention to ones that follow good design essentials. The first of these general rules of design we will more closely examine is ‘unity’.

Unity is seen in the ‘total impact’ of the design. In other words, there is a totality or coherency in the unified whole. Some view this as a harmonious agreement of the elements apparent to the eye. To achieve visual unity in 2-Dimensional art, similar or complimentary shapes, colors, and textures are displayed together. These elements are meant to agree with one another and draw attention to specific focal points in the design’s concept. When we look at objects, designed by man or nature, we intentionally look for an organization of elements, just as we look for coherency in life. Order makes us feel more at ease and we will give things more of our attention if they appear this way to us. This is important to know as a designer because you don't want to loose people's attention with a confusion of unrelated elements, resulting in chaos (and the end of the world as we know it).

We have expectations for unity (or order) in everyday life experiences. Day follows night, apples fall to the ground from trees, red is stop and green is go. Look around your home or work place and recognize the pattern of order (or chaos as the case may be). There are many ways to achieve a sense of order or visual unity in design. The results are often simple and sometimes very complex. We will look at some general examples. Design must have some variety. Absolute sameness in unity would seem monotonous and predictable and thus loose our attention. There are varying degrees of variety in design before the work looses its unification and becomes chaotic and too difficult to decipher. Design with an emphasis on unity will show a subtle degree of variety. Design with an emphasis on variety will appear complex, but retain some unifying factor. For example, a photograph of identical twins, dressed the same, would at first appear a single repeated form. However, our eye would dart back and forth between their faces in search of subtle variation (emphasis on unity). Now imagine a patchwork quilt, with all it's different patterned materials. There seems to be a lot going on in this design, yet the longer you look at it, a system of organized shapes is revealed in a repeated pattern (emphasis on variety).