Layout - Balance

BALANCE
Balance is a skill that everyone uses almost all of their waking hours. It is balance that allows you to stand up and walk around. You balance your checkbook and hopefully find a balance between your academic and social life.

Balance in design is similar to these kinds of balance. You have already had to balance between unity and variety, and in the last project balance figure and ground. Your physical sense of balance will play a part in your ability to balance the visual information in a composition.

Visual interest is what you balance in design. Different colors, shapes sizes, etc. create different degrees of interest. It is the distribution of this interest that you need to control. We will study the abstract aspects of balance to make it easier to understand how balance works. Subject matter changes the situation because different objects can call more (or less) attention to themselves because of their content and relationships to other objects in the image.

Balance can also be described as achieving equilibrium. The problem with this definition is that artists rarely want things to be equal. It usually means that no part of the composition calls too much attention to itself at the expense of the rest of the image. This increases unity, but decreases variety, and hence interest.

There are two systems for achieving balance: Symmetry and Asymmetry

SYMMETRY
Symmetry means a mirror image -- one side is the mirror image of the other. Symmetry can occur in any orientation as long as the image is the same on either side of the central axis.

SYMMETRICAL BALANCE
A vertical axis is required to achieve balance with symmetry. Part of the reason is that we have struggled throughout our lives to perfect our balance in order to stand, walk, ride a bike, etc.. To do this we must have exactly the same weight on both sides of our bodies. Our axis of symmetry is vertical and this makes a good model for symmetry in visual information.

Symmetrical balance is also called formal balance because a form is used -- a mirror image about a vertical axis. The results look formal, organized and orderly.

TYPES OF SYMMETRY
Symmetry means that the sides are exact mirror images of each other. This limits symmetry's application to abstract images since objects in the real world are not truly symmetrical. Try folding a leaf down the center and notice that the opposite sides do not exactly correspond with one another. Fine artists rarely use pure symmetry for this reason. It is more applicable to commercial designs.

NEAR SYMMETRY
Near symmetry is based on symmetry but the two halves are not exactly the same. Slight variations will probably not change the balance but there is more potential for variety and hence more interest. When the sides become too different, symmetry ceases to exist and balance must depend on other concepts.

INVERTED SYMMETRY
Inverted symmetry uses symmetry with one half inverted like a playing cards. This is an interesting variation on symmetry but can make for an awkward balance.

BIAXIAL SYMMETRY

A symmetrical composition can have more than one axis of symmetry. Biaxial symmetry uses two axes of symmetry -- vertical and horizontal. These guarantee balance: top and bottom as well as left and right. The top and bottom can be the same as the left and right, or they can be different. The most regular and repetitive image occurs when they are the same.

More than two axes are possible. Snow flakes and kaleidoscopes have three axes of symmetry.

Radial symmetry is a related concept and can use any number of axes since the image seems to radiate out from the center, like a star.

ASYMMETRY
Asymmetry, also known as informal balance.

ASYMMETRICAL BALANCE

Asymmetry means without symmetry. That by itself has nothing to do with balance. It just means that there are no mirror images in a composition. The term, however, is usually used to describe a kind of balance that does not rely on symmetry: asymmetrical balance. There is no simple formula for achieving balance in asymmetrical balance so the designer must sense whether or not the composition is balanced. This is where your sense of balance really comes into play.

The composition either looks like it is balance or it does not. Where does your attention goes when you look at an image? If it seems to wander around more or less evenly, there is probably balance. If you seem to always come back to the same area, and that is not the center of the composition, then the balance is suspect.