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VISUAL DESIGN LAB

BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

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CHAPTER I
BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

THE SETUP 0 :0 3 :0 1 25

Pick the shape you’ll be working with for the first few
challenges. Toughest decision of your life here. Circle,
square, or triangle? Don’t f*** this up!

THE CONTRASTS 0 :0 6 :0 0 02

As humans, our visual system is hardwired to spot

points of contrast. That’s literally how we see. And we’ll
take advantage of that in our work by varying and con-
trasting elements through their scale, texture, density,
line quality, direction, and color. Something bright is
easier for the eye to spot when it’s against something
dark. Big against small. Rough versus smooth. Focusing
on contrasting these qualities is what we’ll be up to first.
Pretty simple!
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CHAPTER I
BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

SCALE 0 :0 6 :5 6 21

The simplest, and maybe the most powerful, of our

tools. The eye tries to distinguish between things, and
one way to do that is to make them different sizes.
Better yet, VERY different sizes. Kid stuff.

Variation across elements is also something the eye 0 :0 7 :2 8 13

tracks well. You can’t make every element huge. But you
can make them different, and you can make some of
them different enough to make them important.
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CHAPTER I
BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

TEXTURE 0 :1 0 :2 6 27

You can differentiate elements by contrasting the

amount of texture between them, or the types of the
textures themselves. Down the line, textures communi-
cate a huge amount of information to the eye about
what it’s looking at. Critically useful.

DENSITY 0 :1 2 :5 8 12

The eye is naturally drawn to where the most stuff is

happening. So creating areas of dense visual interest as
a contrast to less active areas (so-called “negative
space”) is a pretty good way to attract the eye and
direct its attention where you want it.
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CHAPTER I
BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

WARMUP 0 :1 6 :4 7 14

Like any complex task, we do better at it once our

heads have had a little time to get into it.

You’ll use your favorite vector drawing app to add a

multitude of your chosen shape, in black only, inside a
square white frame. The goal here is to attempt to max-
imize the amount of contrast in scale between elements.
Or to create textures or patterns from those shapes. Or
to create an area of high density of elements in contrast
to an area of relative sparseness. Or all three, but you
don’t have much time. Get to it.

•BLACK SHAPES ONLY

•MOVING, RESIZING, ROTATING ONLY

1:1 ASPECT RATIO

10 IMAGES
:60 SEC EACH
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CHAPTER I
BOOST YOUR CONTRAST

CHALLENGE 0: 23: 51 20

Now that you’re starting to warm up, we’ll do another

10, adding white shapes into the mix. Focusing on
scale, texture/pattern, and density, not necessarily to
maximize them, but to make an attempt with just these
tools to simulate depth and movement if you can (we’ll
talk more about these two later).

•STICK WITH YOUR CHOSEN SHAPE

•MOVING, RESIZING, ROTATING ONLY
•BLACK & WHITE (NO GREYS)

1:1 ASPECT RATIO

10+ IMAGES
10 MINUTES EACH