Objectives

Chapter 9, The Principles of Design, deals with the manner in which designers and artists put together virtually everything they create! The word design is both a verb and a noun, a process and a product. To design something is to organize its parts into a unified whole. We are able to see, in that totality, something we call its "design." Chapter 9 also provides a rationale that unifies designers and artists—designers are creative artists, and artists are problem solving designers! Both groups end up with different results, but they employ the same principles when creating their products, regardless if they're canvases, chairs, sculptures, or buildings.

After reading this chapter you should:

1. know the premise underlying each of the principles of design including:

   • balance (symmetrical, asymmetrical, and radial)
   • emphasis (focal point)
   • proportion and scale
   • rhythm and repetition
   • unity and variety

2. know that just as designers/artists will often employ several devices to imply depth (Chapter 6), they will usually employ most, if not all, of the principles of design in a composition.

3. know that there are conventions or basic rules or agreements as to how the principles of design are used effectively, and consequently there are some artists/designers have deliberately broken the rules.

4. see that our ideas about visual balance are often directly linked to our ideas about physical balance. You should also know that certain types of symmetry and balance contribute to historical or religious compositions.

5. understand that artists use emphasis, or a focal point, to bring us into a composition, and that point of emphasis intentionally affects our understanding of the work. Other artists deliberately produce work without emphasis or a focal point.

6. know the work of the featured WORKS IN PROGRESS artists Diego Veláquez and Judith F. Baca, and their different approaches to composition.

7. recognize that it is the manipulation of the principles of design that often leads to powerful abstraction—consider the works of Paul Cézanne or Pablo Picasso, or Joel Shapiro and Claes Oldenburg.

8. see that historically, there have been formulas for determining the proper proportions and scale of everything from the human body to architecture. Often these formulas are adopted by one culture, and dismissed by another.

Contemporary artists (such as Elizabeth Murray) and architects (Robert Venturi or Frank Gehry) have begun to explore the notion of a new set of principles, based upon the eclectic sum of our modern, complex, visual world of neon signs and fast sound bites. This sense of disjunction, that the parts can never form a unified whole, is what we have come to identify as Postmodernism. In his book, Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi asserts that the collision of signs, styles and symbols that mark the "American Strip," in particular Las Vegas, could be seen as a new form of unity. "Disorder," Venturi writes "[is] an order we cannot see..."

Chapter 9 ends with The Critical Process,an analysis of Claude Monet’s Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil. In this analysis, the author has identified how the artist employed all of the principles of design. As you continue on through this chapter and this book, pick some works to analyze on your own, and see if the process doesn't extend your understanding of the work.

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