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Imagine a waiter supporting a tray with one hand. If
there are too many plates on one side, the tray will be
unbalanced and tip, and plates will go crashing to the floor! If
your scrapbook layout is unbalanced, you may not even be aware
of it on a conscious level, but you will sense that something is
not right. Every scrapbooker has a style that reflects their
individual personality, and everyone should be true to their own
personal style. Even so, there are certain things, like balance, that every page should have to
be visually pleasing no matter what style you use. In this
column, I will explain about design features that will help you
create gorgeous pages every time! This month’s topic is
balance. The examples I’ve shown are quite simple, but the
principles can be applied to any style of layout.
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Fig.1 Grid layout for symmetrical balance
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Every item on your scrapbook page has a certain
visual
weight. Visual weight is a measure of how much anything (a
photo or embellishment or even empty space) attracts the
viewer’s eye. Large items have greater visual weight
(attract the eye more) than small items. Light values and
bright colors are visually “heavier” than dark values
and dull colors. Circles grab more of our attention than
squares do. Understanding visual weight is important because
you can use it to create balance in your finished layouts. A
balanced layout is one that has an overall distribution of
visual weight that is even. You can make sure that your
layouts are balanced several ways.
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Fig.2 Filmstripping for symmetrical balance
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With symmetrical balance, the arrangement of photos and
accents on one half of your layout will be a mirror image of the other.
This is the simplest kind of balance to create in your scrapbook pages,
for example by using a grid layout (Fig. 1) or filmstripping (Fig. 2).
Symmetrical balance tends to be pleasing (because it gives a feeling of
stability), but it can be a little dull (because it also tends to be
formal). This can be balanced by using colorful patterns or interesting
accents. In Figure 2, I placed the letter tags in the title in a zig-zag
line to add energy.
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Fig.3
As symmetrical balance
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Another approach is to use asymmetrical balance, which
can be created by using one large photo and two or more smaller ones
(Fig. 3); this is the same arrangement as when one big kid on a see saw
is balanced by several smaller kids on the other side. Arranging similar
elements, such as photos or accents, so that they mark the apex of an
imaginary (“visual”) triangle also helps create balance (like the
groups of buttons in Figure 3).
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A variation of asymmetrical balance involves placing
elements with similar visual weights in opposite corners
(Fig. 4). The center of balance of the layout will be a
point in the middle (Fig. 4) rather than a line separating
two pages or two halves of a page (Figs. 1-3). |
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Fig.4
The upper right photo is larger but the lower right photo
is a close-up. They have similar visual weights and so are
balanced through the center point of the page. The vellum
text and the title blocks also balance each other.
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