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Elements in Agreement
Harmony & Unity
Harmony is a design principle that involves incorporating balance, alignment, unity, and relationship to ensure that design elements blend together seamlessly. In graphic design, it is important to strive for harmony to ensure your work is aesthetically appealing.
Unity makes a design look like it belongs together and has a sense of harmony. It's what gives a design a feeling of oneness or resolution. It's important for the various components of the design to look like they belong together. Unity can be achieved through the repetition of lines and shapes that have similar characteristics, such as curved lines with curved shapes.
Breaking it Down
People tend to seek comfort, familiarity, and patterns in design. Harmony fills this need as it is about the quality of wholeness or oneness: it is elements in agreement. What this means is that the elements suit and fill complete. Negative space has been used but the design does not feel empty. Colours are complementary but not aggressively so or they are analogous in a way that brings cohesion.
To achieve harmony in your design, you should consider it as a whole work, rather than getting stuck looking at one particular part. This is how our brains are used to working; for example, when we look at a tree, we don't focus on individual leaves, branches, or textures. Instead, we instantly recognize it as a tree due to the harmonious combination of all its elements. By using harmony, your audience should get the overall vibe, message or feeling of your design that you intend for them to experience.
Stephen Peate (2023) "Harmony in graphic design: Exploring the harmony principle of design" URL
3 Ways Harmony can be Achieved Through Art Elements
Colour
Colours can interact harmoniously with each other. Despite being contrasting colours, black and white can work together harmoniously to create a clear and legible image. Additionally, using different shades of the same colour can contribute to a sense of unity on a page.
Shape
The use of different shapes in design can create either a sense of harmony or dissonance. When square and rectangular boxes are arranged in an orderly manner on a web page, they tend to appear harmonious, even if there is no distinct pattern. This is because the shapes have angles that align with each other, creating a harmonious visual effect.
Texture
Textures can also contribute to a harmonious design. Certain textures, such as smooth surfaces and rougher ones, can work together naturally to create a sense of balance on a page. When smooth surfaces and harsh textures are combined, they create an interesting visual contrast that adds depth and visual appeal to the overall design. This combination of textures helps achieve a balanced composition, where the different elements complement each other and contribute to the overall harmony of the design.
3 Practical ways to Achieve Harmony
Repetition
Repetition is not only a principle of graphic design but also a crucial element in achieving a harmonious design. Harmony involves bringing together different elements of a composition that align with each other. In fact, what could complement another element better than a copy of itself? Repetition captures attention and establishes rhythm and comfort within a design. When repetition is used effectively, it directs focus towards specific elements in a composition while also allowing our brains to relax and perceive the image as a unified whole.
Visual Echo
Visual echo is about recognising the fundamental elements of design, such as typography, colour, and style, and then connecting them purposefully. By using visual echo, you can create a consistent and visually pleasing message. For example, when designing a web page, you can determine a colour scheme by using the primary colours of a companies logo. By incorporating the same colours across different design elements like typography, backgrounds and more, harmony and unity are established. Visual echoing of specific elements also helps to emphasise them effectively.
Thematic
Thematic reference is a commonly used concept in graphic design that helps create harmony. It builds upon the idea of visual echo by encompassing symbols, ideas, typography, colour scheme related to the subject matter. For example, if you were designing for a computer brand company, you could emphasise "technical" concepts throughout a web page. This could be achieved by arranging borders to resemble wires or designing the entire layout to resemble a computer screen. By doing so, this would draw attention to the theme and align various design elements to convey a specific message related to the advertisement.
Unity & Disunity
Unity & Disunity through colour
Visual unity refers to the sense of coherence and harmony that is created when all elements in a visual design work together effectively. It is the idea that all the individual parts of a design should come together to create a cohesive whole, with each element complementing and enhancing the others. It can also involve the repetition of styles to ensure consistency throughout the design.
On the right, you can see an example of colour unity. The colours are different hues (which essentially means different colours) but they are similar values (which means they have a similar amount of lightness). The colours that show disunity are different hues as well as different value (some are light and some ar dark). This is visually jarring and not aesthetically pleasing. To learn more about colour theory, click here.
Colour Unity
Colour Disunity
Visual Unity (similar elements)
Visual Disunity (dissimilar elements)
Unity & Disunity through Style
The example above shows what it looks like when a design has visual unity and when it does not. Sports brands like Nike, Reebok and Adidas might seek to create a campaign to attract an audience who are interested in athletics and training. In this example, on the left, Adidas targets this audience through a unified campaign that combines big bold fonts, bright colours, and highly stylized imagery. On the right, you can see what happens when the bold design with high contrast is paired with more pastel colours and an older style of serif font. It is not unified as these elements do not go together. Learn more about typography here.
For more information on Harmony, check out Stephen Peate's (2023) blog post below:
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