Courtesy Jennifer Easterling: A Power Point explaining what The Principles of Design are and how to use them in art.

1. Principles of Design
The glue that pulls everything
together and helps guide their use.

2. Gestalt
• The overall impression.
• It conveys a total visual
message and makes an
impression because of the
individual experiences, past
and present, that you, the
viewer, bring to the as or
design you’re looking at.
• The most successful designs
represent a union of type and
image that stirs a personal
response and leaves you with
a clear, strong, and often
instantaneous message.

3. Balance
• A state of stability within the
design.
Symmetrical
Radial
Asymmetrical

4. Movement
• In a 2D space, your eyes constantly move and are
called to something.
• It is the designer’s role to direct your visual
attention to an image or to type.

5. Repetition
• Repeated lines,
shapes, or colors
can make a
composition seem
to jump or swirl.

6. Rhythm
• Repeated lines and shapes can be used to create
patterns that suggest rhythm and tempo.
• Visual rhythm can be regular and predictable, flowing,
alternating, progressive (changing), or irregular and
unexpected.

7. Visual Path
• Careful placement
of lines, shapes or
forms, and colors
can make the eyes
move along a
visual path or
around a page.

8. Emphasis
• The degree to which
one element, or a
combination of
elements, creates more
attention than
anything else in a
composition.

9. Unity
• Unity refers to
a sense that
everything in a
piece of work
belongs there
and makes a
piece whole.
• May include repeated shapes or textures that form
visual patterns.
• Seems to send a consistent message.

10. Variety
• May use many different
colors, textures, shapes, or
lines.
These components may work together harmoniously, as in a unified
design, or they may create an energetic, lively, or even chaotic effect,
if that’s the designer’s intention.

11. Pattern
• Created by repeating
basic elements
(motifs), such as dots,
lines, symbols, or
shapes

12. Proportion
• The size relationships
between the parts of
an object.

13. Contrast
• The extreme difference between two things.