In a lecture last week, we were introduced to visual contrast and what it’s all about. This concept involves imagery and how it works together with text and other imagery, providing us with a prompt for design analysis. We learnt it is a useful visual approach and how text and image can communicate together by their positioning on a page. We can be attracted, delighted and seduced by the visual power of image. It can communicate to us how the image can inform us of something, underpin something, or explain an idea. The positioning and choice of image provides an interest, reviving, refreshing, or sustaining an idea in our heads.
Keeping this information in mind, we began applying it in a seminar. Our own visual contrasts had to include an image relating to our trend story from the current project (mine was ‘active’), text and a colour. When we were given the task, the biggest question in my head was ‘well, what image do I use?’ I felt like it was a big decision as it could have really affected how my contrasts looked. After realising I was being silly and I could use whatever image I wanted, I went for an 80s inspired aerobic picture. Through research from our project, the 1980s was a key era in fitness fashion, and is still well recognised today.
I liked the colours in this image with the pops of pink against the darker blues and greys, therefore I picked the pastel pink as my feature colour. I then sat there in a mental battle thinking ‘what word do I use when there’s so many words I could choose from?’ I realised I was once again being silly (oops) and thought of the most obvious word to do with active, ‘exercise’. Colour and word picked; I began my visual contrast.
I played around with the positioning of my image with a colour block and the font and size for my font. After playing around for the whole seminar with no outcome I truly liked, I carried on when I came home. Pinterest was my saviour. That beautiful site with all sources of inspiration at my fingertips. One search of ‘visual contrast layout ideas’ and bam I was off. Moving my image, cropping it, creating different colour blocks, and different ways of writing the simple word ‘exercise’, I completed 5 of my own visual contrasts I’m quite happy with.
After my mini meltdown of questioning whether Arial italic or Arial Bold was best, I think my finished images show visual contrast well with different layouts. I would like to do this again with a different trend story and images, producing images of visual contrast quite different to this. Once again, I need to stop overthinking (read my previous blog post to see my de-stress) and just go for it. Afterall, failure is okay, and creative experimentation is key!
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