Welcome to the second part of this course, after watching the first videos, you should have the most important tools to create a fine piece of design. However, we still have to learn how to use these instruments properly. In this part of the course, we will learn the importance of balance and whitespace. Proximity and unity, consistency and repetition, alignment. And last but not least, contrast. Let's start talking about whitespace and balance whitespace is extremely significant, although often not considered by designers.

Whitespace is technically speaking, the area that is not filled by design elements. The empty space you may think is not a big deal, but whitespace is an element of design that bears a great importance. With whitespace we can define the perception of how big is space in our composition and placed our elements according to it, the bigger the whitespace, the bigger the total space. Let's try to put this elephant on our paper and make it look as big as possible. As you can see, if we occupied the whole area with the figure, it looks compressed and squashed, as if it was trying to fit into a tiny place, it's not really convincing. Let's try to reduce its size.

Can you see the difference? Now the empty space is perceived as the surrounding of the elephant in our frame, and it looks bigger and further away. Like we were taking a picture of him from distance. Now that we know the importance of whitespace, it's time to talk about balance. In the first part of this course, we talked about the concept of mass. Let's consider each design element like a pebble.

Now imagine that each section have our design, get the side of the balance. And we need to put our pebbles in order to keep the sides balanced. That's exactly what happens in our design. Each section must have the same weight as the other sections that came refers to the concept of mass. First of all, we have to identify the sections that are composing our design, then we have to feel or adjust the sections with the right mass, we can have few heavy elements, or a big number of light elements in our section. There is not a rule for this.

The important is that the balance doesn't collapse. Before we start talking about the definition of proximity and unity, I want to give you a piece of advice regarding how to balance your composition correctly. Some designers is harmonize their composition on purpose, since lack of balance suggests tension and action. It's actually quite interesting. If you want to do the same follow through Balance first lack of it after never stopped considering it. In this way, you will always have the perfect balance as a reference point and you will be fully aware of the right amount of tension that you want to add after without making everything collapse.

In the next video, we will talk about proximity and unity