The 4 Principles of Design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity

I have always been fascinated with art, especially oil paintings.  One of my favorite paintings is the Mona Lisa.  I have always been drawn to artists who have that unique mine and steady hand to design a nice piece of art for people like myself to enjoy.  This week assignment was a mind blower for me, because one of the areas of focus that I’ve never taken into consideration the four elements of design; contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.  In the first part of design process, I understand that a great contrast can give off a very good first impression for the viewer.  Choosing the right style, images, colors and fonts can give a document a great lasting impression.  That is why I chose several images with a bold color scheme, and added a black style font with an alluring steel gray back ground.  Moving on to repetition, repetition in a print design is as simple as repeating design elements which can help create a consistent.  In my newsletter I repeated the element in the font text in the body of the document.  The third element is alignment; alignment plays a vital role in how you would position your images on a document.  It acts as the same principle as if you were painting a portrait, mirror, or just a room.  We want to make sure that are colors and images are in aligning with one another in order to make the document stand-out. As you can see, I align each school mascot right underneath one another.  And lastly, we have proximity; proximity is grouping like elements together and separating those elements that are not.  In my document, I’m going to fall back on the school mascots, although they are different, I position the logo right underneath one another and provided content for each logo.