Visual Composition and Writing Composition

When making a poster or any kind of visual composition, there are many guidelines, strategies, and techniques to be taken in consideration. This is perhaps what most surprised me from this week’s readings. I’ve made many visual communication posters at my workplace, and despite that I’ve done it thinking in ways to facilitate productivity, I never perceived how many techniques were available to make my posters more effective. With the readings I came to the realization that visual composition is just complex as writing composition.

In visual composition content and form is primarily expressed, taken in consideration the audience in a visual composition. Bang explains that the principles work in conjunction with each other and they are subservient to context and content - to the picture meaning. To add, Dondis states that a message is composed with purpose: to tell, express, explain, direct, inspire, affect. In pursuit of any purpose, choices are made to reinforce and strengthen expressive intentions for maximum control of response. The visual elements have basic substance of what we see, and they are few in number: the dot, line, shape, direction, tone, color, texture, dimension, scale, and movement. Written composition has many of those elements like shape, style, tone, and movement throughout paragraphs. Visual composition like writing composition also has unity. Unity is a proper balance of diverse elements into one totality that is visually all of a piece. The collection of many units should dovetail so completely that it is viewed and considered as a single thing. But, while any visual work can be analyzed from many points of view, most writing compositions provides an explicit point of view from the author.

There is so much to take from these readings that I would have to retype Dobis whole paper to talk about some of the points to remember. It is so rich in information, that is impossible to choose just one part. But, some of the techniques like the importance of balance, symmetry, predictability and so on, and the guidelines are key to compose an effective visual craft, and I hope to never forget. I also hope to remember where I saved these articles and be able to comeback to it, any time that I compose a visual craft.