The role of balance as an organizing design principle underlying adults' compositional strategies for creating visual displays

Locher, PJ; Stappers, PJ Pieter Jan; Overbeeke, CJ Kees

doi:10.1016/s0001-6918(98)00008-0

Cited by 63 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…These findings are similar to those of our earlier study (Locher et al, 1998) in which non-artists created designs within a square format using circles, squares, rectangles, or leaves. As was the case for artists in the present study, Locher et al observed that the balance centers of the non-artists' designs were closely aligned with the geometric centers of the pictorial field and the designs' structural weight was evenly distributed about their axes.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Previous attempts to document the role of balance in composition have determined its presence in paintings and other artworks qualitatively by examination of their structural organization or "geometry" (see, e.g., Bouleau, 1980). We (Locher, Stappers, & Overbeeke, 1998) developed a technique, described below, which enabled us to evaluate quantitatively three structural characteristics of compositions that contribute to balance, namely, the location of the balancing center of a design, the distribution of physical (structural) weight about its axes, and the alignment and directional qualities of its compositional elements. Using this technique Locher et al demonstrated that adults untrained in the arts did, in fact, employ balance as the chief organizing design principle as they created designs composed of either circles, squares, triangles, or leaves.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Artists' Use of Compositional Balance for Creating Visual Displays

Locher

Cornelis

Wagemans

et al. 2001

Empirical Studies of the Arts

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This study sought empirical evidence that balance influences the way adults trained in the visual arts create visual displays. Thirty-two volunteers made four designs each using two different types of shapes (rectangles or quadrilaterals) within two types of pictorial fields (a circular or rectangular format). A videotape recording of the development of each design from start to completion was used to create a digitized record of its image at 20 percent intervals of the time taken for completion. It was found that, regardless of element type, format, or phase of construction, the center of a design was closely aligned with the geometric center of the pictorial field. Furthermore, the structural or physical weight of the compositional elements measured quantitatively was evenly distributed (balanced) about the principal axes of the designs throughout their construction. These findings demonstrate the power of the center of a circular and rectangular field to function as an "anchor" or balancing point about which a design's structural skeleton is organized by artists. 213

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Artists' Use of Compositional Balance for Creating Visual Displays

Locher

Cornelis

Wagemans

et al. 2001

Empirical Studies of the Arts

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“…Art historians have proposed that pleasing or dynamically balanced composition is a perceptual phenomenon that arises spontaneously from the interaction of "visual forces" across an image [1,2]. This view has been substantiated by experimental research [23,24,26] in cognitive psychology. Eye movements may play an important role in judgments about composition (see Locher [22] for a review).…”

Section: Composition In Psychology and Photographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze-based interaction for semi-automatic photo cropping

Santella

Agrawala

DeCarlo

et al. 2006

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

325

182

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We present an interactive method for cropping photographs given minimal information about the location of important content, provided by eye tracking. Cropping is formulated in a general optimization framework that facilitates adding new composition rules, as well as adapting the system to particular applications. Our system uses fixation data to identify important content and compute the best crop for any given aspect ratio or size, enabling applications such as automatic snapshot recomposition, adaptive documents, and thumbnailing. We validate our approach with studies in which users compare our crops to ones produced by hand and by a completely automatic approach. Experiments show that viewers prefer our gaze-based crops to uncropped images and fully automatic crops.

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“…In visual design, for instance, balance is a key principle that helps designers to convey their messages [15][16][17][18][19]. Photographers, specifically, create visual balance in the spatial composition of photos through photo cropping [20,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning visual balance from large-scale datasets of aesthetically highly rated images

Jahanian

Vishwanathan

Allebach

2015

Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XX

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The concept of visual balance is innate for humans, and influences how we perceive visual aesthetics and cognize harmony. Although visual balance is a vital principle of design and taught in schools of designs, it is barely quantified. On the other hand, with emergence of automantic/semi-automatic visual designs for self-publishing, learning visual balance and computationally modeling it, may escalate aesthetics of such designs. In this paper, we present how questing for understanding visual balance inspired us to revisit one of the well-known theories in visual arts, the so called theory of "visual rightness", elucidated by Arnheim. We define Arnheim's hypothesis as a design mining problem with the goal of learning visual balance from work of professionals. We collected a dataset of 120K images that are aesthetically highly rated, from a professional photography website. We then computed factors that contribute to visual balance based on the notion of visual saliency. We fitted a mixture of Gaussians to the saliency maps of the images, and obtained the hotspots of the images. Our inferred Gaussians align with Arnheim's hotspots, and confirm his theory. Moreover, the results support the viability of the center of mass, symmetry, as well as the Rule of Thirds in our dataset.

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The role of balance as an organizing design principle underlying adults' compositional strategies for creating visual displays

Cited by 63 publications

References 9 publications

Artists' Use of Compositional Balance for Creating Visual Displays

Artists' Use of Compositional Balance for Creating Visual Displays

Gaze-based interaction for semi-automatic photo cropping

Learning visual balance from large-scale datasets of aesthetically highly rated images

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