Download Episode 27Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.Now these days we&#39;ve taken up the principle of Balance. And having established the concept of optical weight, and the way our page becomes a kind of balancing beam as we add visual elements to it, we turned our attention to the idea of Formal or Symmetrical balance. And we described this as a mirror image type of arrangement, where elements are symmetrically balanced on a page with respect to its central axis. And wee also pointed the implications of formal balance, the effect achieved by symmetry. Which is a feeling of equilibrium, and a sense of stasis and stability. And if I&#39;m recapping too many concepts, too quickly, just take some time to listen to the previous programs, where I explain each idea in turn.But moving on from there, the next concept we need to identify is Asymmetrical Balance, also called Informal Balance. And the typical example of this kind of balance is when one large element is counterbalanced by several smaller objects. Or if you&#39;ll recall the role of value that we described, we may have a situation where a smaller, dark object, is counterbalanced by a larger, light-colored object. At first glance, we might think these kinds of compositions aren&#39;t balanced, because they don&#39;t have the obvious symmetry that makes the situation feel all the more stable. But on closer examination, we realize that the teeter totter of our page is balanced, after all. And though the objects distributed on either side of the central axis may be very different from each other, the optical weight of each side appears to be about even.An even more clever example of assymetrical balance is when a large object on one side of the page is balanced by a smaller object placed at the very far end of the opposite side, mimicking the physics of leverage.But, as we explained last time, the visual designer is usually more concerned with the effects or implications of the type of balance being employed. And where we said last time that Formal balance imparts a conservative and a stable feeling to a composition, Informal balance, on the other hand, with its lack of symmetry, achieves quite the opposite. In fact, the effect is what I&#39;d call a dynamic sense of order. And that&#39;s because there are differences in the page. While it feels resolved in terms of balance, it isn&#39;t equalized, the way water seeks its own level. And in that sense it&#39;s unresolved, but in a good way. It&#39;s got a dynamism, and so informal balance implies movement.So, look around. Pay attention to compositions in ads and books and magazines. And you&#39;ll see what I mean. Those ads for Absolut Vodka, with their perfectly centered single bottle, and the perfectly centered caption are always symetrical and formally balanced. And that stable feeling we infer from those layouts is a good thing, because that bottle h

Design Guy, Episode 27, Asymmetrical or Informal Balance

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