Lecture 3 Notes

Framing, Hierarchy, and Layers 1/24/11

Framing

• Picturing objects
• Some elements related: cropping, borders, margins, and captions
• Affects how we perceive information
• Contain an image or a piece of it
• Can divide its image from its background

Cropping

• Helps redraw borders and alters the shape of original picture
• Changes scale of the elements, direction or form, or focus of the picture

Margins and Bleeds

• Margins

-affect the way we perceive content by providing open spaces around text and images
-provide a protective frame around contents
-provide space for other info

Framing text and images

• Adding text to a picture changes its meaning
• Text could be subordinate or dominant to a picture
• Text can respect or ignore the borders of an image

Borders

• Frontier between inside and outside

Hierarchy

• Marks the order of importance of different elements in the same space
• Conveyed visually through variations in scale, value, color, etc.
• We want visual order!
• Uses clear marks of separation to signal a change from one level to another

Basic Typographic Hierarchy

• Example: table of contents
• Provides a structural picture
• Helps provide an image of how the book is organized
• Can use alignments, leading, indents, type sizes and colors

Layers

• Simultaneous overlapping components of an image or sequence
• Used in many media programs
• Maps use overlapping layers to associate and separate different levels of data
• Printing techniques use multiple layers of ink to build a single image

Transparency

• Used to create dense, layered imagery built from veils of color and texture
• Any surface in the physical world is transparent or opaque
• Photoshop allows you to adjust the opacity
• “Transparent” image or surface generally opaque to some degree
• Transparency and layers are related phenomena
• Viewer perceives the transparency of one plane in relation to a second one
• Builds complexity