[Back] nevermind [NEXT]For those unfamiliar, the rule is that the main focal point (the bit you want to draw the observer into the picture first - such as the eye of a the person in a portrait) of the picture should be at the intersection of one third from the edges of the picture.
Another "rule" is the "sacred geometry" where elements that have long edges are more appealing when they are in alignment either with other "lines" in the image, or with the edges of the image itself. I've taken many landscape photos with a camera leveled with a gyroscope stabiliser (or just a spirit level when on a tripod) but the resulting images didn't "pop" until they were rotated so the ground aligned with the frame, or the picture skewed so the walls of buildings were truly vertical.
But then I've seen some incredible photographs that break those rules and only work because they deliberately broke the rules - some quickly found examples (and article affirming my diatribe above :)) from natgeo: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/break...
It reminds me of shuhari (守破離), an idea from martial arts and other traditional practices. It basically means "Follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules", and the characters mean "follow, break, transcend". The article hints at this too: follow the rules until you find a good reason not to. As it is aimed at beginners we should mostly be learning and following the rules until we have enough experience to start breaking them.
I really like how that lines up against one of my favorite maxims, "First do it, then do it right, then do it better."
Think about it: creating software is creating new rules. You gotta start somewhere and refine the system.
But if you learn an existing rule system, you need to follow it first, then break them, then transcend/improve them.
So shuhari is ”first do it, then do it right, then do it better” for professionals.
Designers will futz with kerning or whatever for hours.
守 does mean "follow" in the specific sense of "following rules", though it has no sense related to motion and most "following", including metaphorical following, would be represented by 隨. 守 mostly means "guard" or "protect", and I assume that's the metaphor that was extended to complying with rules and correctly performing rituals.
破 means "break", no problem there.
離 means "leave" as in "go away"; it does not appear to have any sense of "transcend".
Well, sure, in the sense that abandoning necessarily involves leaving, and 離 can refer to the leaving aspect of that. But "abandon" adds a lot of meaning that isn't generally present in "leave"; you might be looking for 棄, which is specifically about abandoning.
離 is a much more basic word having to do with distance and separation. But since separation and abandonment are closely related, it does appear to have been used in something resembling that sense. Consulting a dictionary of Middle Chinese:
> 離
> 1. to part from, separate, leave; e.g. 離緒 emotions at parting; 離居 leave one's home; also, live apart
> b) stray from, astray; estrange(ment); divorce oneself from; be or get free of; e.g. 離落 aimlessly astray, drifting rootlessly; 離書 bill of divorce; 離結 free from bonds
That gloss is the closest one I see to "abandon". (And also looks like a pretty good match to the usage above; you can imagine escaping the binding of the rules as a close analogue of escaping literal bindings.) Compare
> 棄
> 1. throw away, discard; put aside, leave behind; abandon, forsake; renounce, reject, abolish, get rid of; annul
(Why Middle Chinese? It's easier for me to look up, and it seems more likely to be reflected in Japanese than modern Chinese usage is.)
Optically is more center of mass, but ideal more 'center of visual weight'. Larger things are 'heavier', darker/more contrasty things are 'heavier'. Rounded things should extend over an alignment line a bit, flat shapes butt up against it (e.g. in the letters lO the O extends over the baseline slightly compared to the l, to visually connect with the baseline more).
In general the way it works is you align with whatever software says and you look at it and say does it actually look aligned or need minor adjustment? Because the point is to look aligned rather than to be mathematically correctly aligned. Like our letters above, they look more visually on the same baseline when they're not, then when all the rounded base letters sit most 'correctly' on the line.
The author is suggesting you use the mean X value of all the pixels in the shape, instead of the mode x value.
I'm sure fancier image editing software does this, but your eyes are pretty good at it too because it's just dividing the surface area in half, or thinking about it as the "center of mass" as you put it: where could you attach a string to this shape such that it doesn't tip over one way or another?
I think that this might be more true in screen based work than in printed publications. The focus of a printed page tends towards the top, but not necessarily at the top. A webpage is a different entity… not always seen in its entirety. The way that unity manifests would therefore necessarily be different. The order of weight would be better maintained at a local level, not global.
> Make outer padding the same or more than inner padding
This is one that is generally true, but not always. A framed drawing can often safely accommodate more space at the bottom than the sides and top.
Optical weight is nice and all (and a better simple rule than just spacing things by equal distance), but in the end you also have other phenomena (humans perceive horizontal lines different than vertical ones etc.)
Just the seemingly simple task of spacing out letters can get complicated pretty fast if it should look pleasing as in "as if there was no design there".
> I think making measurements mathematically related is a convenience and is often helpful
I think, in the absence of any guiding principles or rules, this is a good one to have. It's easier to say "Ok, this should be 4, 12, 36" then go from there.
I think heavier first is just because so many people make the same mistakes. Clearly, if you have experience, you can break the rules anytime you want and even make up your own.
not because not doing so would result in bad design decisions, but because it makes it much much easier for people unfamiliar with design work to:
- keep things consistent - stay within a balanced set of measurements that are easy to remember and expand - avoid ending up with a set of values that are too close to each other to meaningfully impact the design, but are therefore hard to maintain and identify
Heck, related by Wiener noise/integrated random walk is mathematically related, and if you watch 2D animations of random walks you'll soon develop a visual feeling for that.
However, there is sort of a reason to do it: baseline alignment. If you have columns with different contents, the heights of everything should work out so that the baselines continue to align over the page. You can adjust this manually, but a mathematical relation can be a shortcut there.
He gives the good advice that you should only follow the rules when they make sense, and not otherwise. With that in mind, the two rules I disagree with the most are:
> Measurements should be mathematically related
> Elements should go in order of visual weight
Because, whereas most of the other rules are probably good to follow 90% of the time, these feel sort of arbitrary and opinionated.
I think making measurements mathematically related is a convenience and is often helpful, but for the same reason that optically centering things is better than mathematically centering them, I think you can easily ignore a mathematical relationship between values if it doesn't look as good. There is nothing inherent about humans that makes us prefer magic numbers, it's just that using them gives us an easy way to achieve visual consistency. If it stops doing that, ignore the ratio. If a grid or your font sizes look better nudged by a pixel or two in one direction or the other, do that instead.
With respect to ordering elements by visual weight, my only complaint is that he specifically says "heavier first", rather than "heavier first, or heavier last, both are fine as long as you're consistent". So, it's a nitpick, but it bothered me because it's an easy distinction to make.