Principle of Contrast in Art What It Is & How To Use It

Table Of Content

• Types of Contrast in Web Design
• Contrasting values
• What Negative Effects Does a Bad Website Design Have On My Business?
• Essential Design Trends, May 2024
• Seeing the Unseen: A Designer’s Guide for the Color Blind
• The Color of Contrast: Painting with a Bold Palette
• Techniques to create contrast in an artwork

Too much contrast can overwhelm the visual senses, appearing chaotic. It can be used to guide the user’s attention, highlight important information, and enhance the overall user experience. For example, you can use contrast to make your call-to-action buttons stand out, or to differentiate between different sections of your website.

Types of Contrast in Web Design

And your eyes instantly go to the white color text, improving sales. The logo combines crisp, angular geometric shapes (rectangles and triangles) with sleek, thin lines that emphasize the structural precision and modernity of the firm’s designs. The interplay of these contrasting spatial elements not only conveys a sense of innovation but also hints at the firm’s attention to detail. Reducing the brightness and darkening the tones of the photograph accentuates the contrast within it and the white font color balances the reading experience.

Contrasting values

The use of contrasting colors that are in conflict tends to irritate or confuse the eye. Complementary colors are used to establish contrast, and they are easier on the eye. It can be as simple as using light and dark colors and big and small sizes. Or, it can be more complex and involve using different shapes, textures and values. Contrast is often used to create visual interest, highlight important information and catch the reader’s attention. At the same time, repetition of the text treatments and shapes ensure the design still feels cohesive.

What Negative Effects Does a Bad Website Design Have On My Business?

This will only result in you creating better output as time goes on. But just by moving the coffee cup, the effectiveness of the design has reached the next level. Customers’ eyes will be immediately drawn to the cup and then eventually the text next to it.

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These filter effects include blur, brightness, contrast, or saturation filters. Each of these techniques provides a great way to single out a design element when the user is engaging with it. Light blue or any other pastel color, for example, wouldn’t be particularly prominent on an interface with other pastels of similar shades. But, if pastel elements were juxtaposed with darker, bold elements such as a deep eggplant color, the difference between the dark and light colors would be pronounced. Placing a large object or block of text beside a small object or block of text has an impact. The eye naturally seeks out the larger object, interpreting it as more important.

Seeing the Unseen: A Designer’s Guide for the Color Blind

The common ground between these principles is that they represent how design elements work together to form a visual entity that users perceive and interact with. When it comes to creating contrast with size, you’ll want to keep scale in mind — the relative size of one design element compared to another. As I touched on earlier, the scale of different elements creates a visual hierarchy, which is key for conveying your information in order of its importance. We love the use of brass accents mixed throughout high-contrast interiors. Choose finishes that such as a brass sconce against a dark wall or counter stools with brass accents to balance the contrast in your darker finish floors.

Always add alt-text to images.

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As we mentioned, contrast can be created by a variation in sizing, shape, color, or other features. Emphasizing a dichotomy of importance between two design elements doesn’t depend on the type of contrast that exists — rather on the degree of polarity between them. Of the design principles, contrast is one of the most effective techniques for drawing attention to important elements or a key message.

The Color of Contrast: Painting with a Bold Palette

The Gestalt principles of design tell us that each design has a figure and ground setting. The subject is usually the figure and the other elements around become the group. You will never have to worry about these if you can create a visual hierarchy using contrast in your design. Have you ever noticed how on social media ads, one line of text is bigger than the other? This is how contrast in design helps designers to show which line of text is more important than the other. This is where the art of contrast proves its ability to captivate all aspects of a story, rather than one.

As the firm’s founder and principal designer, Amy has built a reputation for taking a holistic approach to design rooted in interior architecture, technical skill and creativity. If done right, your high-contrast Interior will feel perfectly in harmony, and make your space look cohesive and as a whole. So whether you go for contrast in the form of differing hues, or decor pieces, just make sure to vary your tones and textures for a look that feels complete.

We completely understand your commercial needs and expectations; it’s our responsibility to cater to all your needs as a leading graphic design services agency. Regardless of the company size and the industry you belong to, we provide the best custom logo design that fits your unique needs. Our graphic designers are highly experienced and capable of dealing with a wide range of clients from multiple industries. Canva, the online design platform, uses a white and light-colored background with darker colors for its text and interactive elements.

So, employing size to bring out the contrast in design is a great technique. Yes, our human brain is wired to spot contrasts and attach meaning to them. We will always scan from bigger to smaller, and that is what we call visual hierarchy. By varying the typeface, color, shape, and size of your text you can control what the customer sees first and last.

Low contrast, on the other hand, is when there is not much difference between the light and dark values. The level of contrast you use in your artwork will depend on the effect you want to create. Contrast is a compositional element in art and a principle of art and design. Artists can use contrast to create their intended effect, whether that is one of balance, or dynamism. By altering the difference between colour and value in an artwork, you can create a sense of realism, or abstraction, and produce a harmonious or discordant image.

The first step to mastering shape contrasts is breaking down your entire artwork into basic shapes. Giving the focus of the design a unique shape will make it stand out while making the overall work look less bland. A well-contrasted landing page can guide a visitor’s journey, emphasizing important information and calls to action. MailChimp, an email marketing platform, uses contrast effectively on its landing pages. They utilize bright, bold colors for their CTA buttons against a muted background, making it virtually impossible for visitors to miss their next action step. Effective banners instantly draw attention and communicate a message quickly.

You can make contrast work for you, depending on your specific artwork. If you have one of the main elements of the design that looks out of focus, you can reinforce its color to draw attention to the design element. Putting contrasting dull colors against saturated ones creates the best color contrasts. You can reduce or increase the intensity of your color contrast by simply increasing or decreasing the saturation of the contrasting colors. On the color wheel, colors on opposite sides are contrasting, and using opposing colors without regard for their intensity or saturation is the use of “pure” hue contrast. True mastery of color contrast is when you can effectively combine hue contrast with the other color contrast types.

Like contrast in design separates one element from the other, using similar design styles for a group of elements makes the customer feel they all have a singular role. What every brand manager and marketer needs to know about using contrast in designs is that it helps you achieve all of your marketing goals. Let’s take a closer look at a real-world example to illustrate the power of contrast within the principles of repetition and rhythm. Imagine a website for an art gallery, dedicated to showcasing a diverse range of artistic styles and periods. The homepage employs repetition through a consistent grid layout for displaying artwork thumbnails. This grid structure establishes a rhythm of viewing, allowing users to browse through the art with ease.