Advanced SearchColor And Composition (Mecaleha)
There are an awful lot of choices to make while creating a vector. We can decide exactly where each shape gets placed and what color it’ll be. This is a big advantage over photography, where you’re limited by what’s in front of your lens and your skills in Photoshop. The downside to endless choice is we often make the wrong ones when it comes to color and composition.
Example 1 simply isn’t making any sense. The shapes are all fighting with each other for the viewer’s attention, rather than integrating the way you’d expect a good composition to. There’s no clear flow to the placement of each shape so your eye just bounces around with nowhere to go. The shapes are roughly drawn and sloppy to boot. This background would be really tough for a designer to use: it’s cluttered, busy, and there’s nowhere to place their text.
Example 2 is much better. There’s a clear flow: all the shapes in the file help lead your eye towards the sphere. The composition is further reinforced by the placement of arrows on the right hand side of the page. The color scheme is unified and coherent, with a subtle vignette to help further draw you into the frame.
Cropping and Alignment (Jayesh)
There are countless ways to organize vector elements on an artboard. That’s one of the best things about vectors: It’s easy to break them apart and tinker with individual shapes, without the loss of image quality you often see when editing a raster file. That said, vectors can easily suffer from poor decisions when it comes to composition and cropping.
The elements in Example 1 have been aligned to the vertical or horizontal edges of each other. This creates awkwardly tight eye movements for the viewers, and makes things appear cut off.
Negative space is wonderful when used effectively. On the other hand, abandoning large areas of real estate within an illustration, or chopping off shapes without forethought, just shows poor planning, like in Example 2.
Clumping everything into the centre in Example 3 not only creates a rushed and unplanned composition, it is just bad feng shui.
With the final ‘corrected’ example we wanted to demonstrate a few key points. Notice how the items are grouped into three spaces: the foreground (the TV and TV stand), the mid-ground (the chair, end table and camera), and the background (the basketball poster on the wall). This divides and organizes the composition for our viewer and will allow their eye to travel through the each part of the illustration, just like telling a story. Not seeing it? Let us explain…
The foreground elements are an example of good overlapping. The shapes aren't tightly spaced and they don't touch each other at weird points. There is a small but healthy gap between the chair and the TV, which lets the viewer know that these two elements are engaged with each other but aren't the same part of the story.
In the mid-ground we’ve demonstrated a way to not overlap objects while still maintaining eye flow and perspective with the placement of the chair, camera and end table. This compositional trick isn’t for everyone, but we wanted to give the viewers time to breathe, and not go overkill on one particular way to show depth.
The poster on the wall is in the background, but we used the lamp as an aid for eye movement. The lamp points from the mid-ground chair and overlaps the poster just enough to let our viewers know it is there, but since it isn't a major part of the story, it quickly brings the eye back to the foreground (like a cycle).
Another thing to note is the cropping. The poster is running off the top of the page because otherwise it would have created an awkward division at the top of the composition. This would have detracted, rather then added to, the overall composition. The bottom of the TV stand also runs off the page on the same vertical plane as the poster. This commands the space and leads the viewer’s eye inward. One last thing: Take a look at the space between the edge of the TV stand and the edge of the picture. Cropping the stand in two places would have been awkward; instead we’ve left a healthy little gap that’s similar in size to the space between the chair and the TV.
The foreground elements are an example of good overlapping. The shapes aren't tightly spaced and they don't touch each other at weird points. There is a small but healthy gap between the chair and the TV, which lets the viewer know that these two elements are engaged with each other but aren't the same part of the story.
In the mid-ground we’ve demonstrated a way to not overlap objects while still maintaining eye flow and perspective with the placement of the chair, camera and end table. This compositional trick isn’t for everyone, but we wanted to give the viewers time to breathe, and not go overkill on one particular way to show depth.
The poster on the wall is in the background, but we used the lamp as an aid for eye movement. The lamp points from the mid-ground chair and overlaps the poster just enough to let our viewers know it is there, but since it isn't a major part of the story, it quickly brings the eye back to the foreground (like a cycle).
Another thing to note is the cropping. The poster is running off the top of the page because otherwise it would have created an awkward division at the top of the composition. This would have detracted, rather then added to, the overall composition. The bottom of the TV stand also runs off the page on the same vertical plane as the poster. This commands the space and leads the viewer’s eye inward. One last thing: Take a look at the space between the edge of the TV stand and the edge of the picture. Cropping the stand in two places would have been awkward; instead we’ve left a healthy little gap that’s similar in size to the space between the chair and the TV.
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