Elements of Design – Introductory post

Interior design can be complicated.  There is a vast amount of knowledge that the top designers and architects have contributed and shared across the internet. What makes an award winning kitchen? Who determines what design styles are “in” or “out?”  Regardless of your experience with interior design or remodeling, there are seven concepts s to know. These basics will help you spot trendy and well put together designs. The Elements of Design and the Principles of Design are the fundamental tools that your interior designer carries with them in their tool bag (move over hot sauce.)

This blog post will cover the Elements of Design. These five concepts are considered the building blocks of design. You will see them in every work of art including paintings, sculptures, and of course interior design.

• Line:  The simplest and easiest  of the five elements. Look at what you already know about Lines. All of them are straight, and go from one point to another. They can vary in width, go up, down, right or left, be dotted or jagged.Drawing a line on an art medium isn’t much different than how designers and architects use them. Of course they use them to create drawings and elevations in the BUILDING of the space… but what about the things that goes INTO the space like carpeting, paint, and furniture? An Interior Designer, much like a painter wants you to feel and interpret the space in a certain way. Sight lines are used to create visual and physical aesthetics in a space to have your eyes follow a path, better known as the natural flow of a room. Look at the below photo. First impression: where do your eyes land and where do they go as you explore the rest of the room?

 

• Shape/Form Simply put shapes are the intersections of lines which enclose a space. When we think about shapes, mostly likely the we think of the geometric variety we learned in grade school – squares, triangles, and circles, however, there are other types as well. Organic shapes such as seashells, flowers and leaves are naturally occurring and when implemented into a design, can bring about emotions and memoriesIt should be noted here, that shapes are a two dimensional object. FORM is a three dimensional shape.

 

• Texture:  Is it rough, jagged, smooth? Texture can be real or implied. Real is how the object actually feels against your skin. Implied is like a photograph of sandpaper–while on a smooth piece of paper still “feels” rough.  The texture is implied yet felt.  This technique of adding visual weight makes you FEEL the room.

• Color:  What our eyes see due to the reflection of light through different wavelengths. Rainbows are a perfect example of how color works. (More on color theory/blocking soon) There are over 10,000 colors and hues the human eye recognizes. From the first days of human, color has been used as an expression of emotion. The subsequent generations have expanded color theory into a science with results of certain colors and their effects on the brain. Color generates excitement, feelings of calm, and change perception of a room.

• Space:  The area around or in an object or work of art. Negative space, the term you are probably most familiar with is the concept of the blank (or white) space in an email or drawing. Negative space is under appreciated. It makes images or designs larger or smaller.