Page design: Balance

I love the principles of design. Since I started scrapping in 2002, I have devoured every book I could find dedicated to these principles. I even took Cathy Z's class at Big Picture Classes called Design your Life, which is now self-paced and lived up to its billing for me: I can now look at one of my pages and know pretty automatically what is needed.

What are the principles of design? Here's a list that I found, no lie, on a poster at my school outside the Family and Consumer Science (nee Home Ec) department:

• Line
• Shape
• Space
• Texture
• Color
• Balance
• Proportion
• Rhythm
• Emphasis
• Harmony

Not all of those are covered in Cathy's class, but she the ones she focused on aided me immensely. I heartily recommend the class to anyone wanting some training in design.

While working on a layout at Archiver's this past weekend, I realized that layout would be a perfect example to share what I know about Balance.

Here's the preliminary page after I left Archiver's:


It's nice, and I used a misting technique I like: lay a piece of chipboard down before misting to mask out an area, then mist in two colors, heavier with the lighter/less intense color, then outline the masked spot. I also sewed around the edges and below the photos.

The problem is balance: the greater weight is in the middle, and the lower banner is too light to carry an impact.

To help, I added buttons. I tried blue and red, but they added too much weight, so I went with yellow:


And to add just a thread more weight, I threaded them with red floss (pun intended):

(Just for a hand-stitching and threading buttons FYI: I use 3 strands of DMC. That amount adds a nice weight, not too much.)

Still, that open area to the top right bothered me. I don't fill space just to fill space, but the balance here is too lopsided and heavy on the left. So I decided to use some scraps to the top right corner to add a little more weight to that side:


And voila, a much better balanced layout!