Recurrence of a Single Element in a Work of Art

Let's look at 3 subjects that, at first glance, may strike you as being incredibly bones and self-explanatory. Notwithstanding, although they may seem similar they should need no introduction, we should written report them. By agreement these concepts, you'll be able to apply them more than effectively to obsess your users' attention while making your designs more constructive.

Say "repetition" and yous might remember nigh someone who says the same matter over and over over again. Notwithstanding, it'due south different in pattern. Repeating things does not take to be dull! In fact, it can empower a design when used in the right style. It tin too ensure that messages are meliorate understood. As designers, nosotros take three repetition methods: repetition, patterns, and rhythm.

Repetition

Repetition is merely repeating a single element many times in a design. For instance, you could draw a line horizontally and then describe several others next to it.

Repetition can exist useful in web and app design. For example, you'd wait the logo of a business to be repeated on every page and in the aforementioned place. Carte du jour items are likewise often repeated in the same place on a folio. This helps provide a consistent user feel. By repeating elements, we every bit designers not only deliver according to our users' expectations in this mode, but we also improve their experience. Our existence consistent makes the users more comfortable. Remember that the center works in a sure way by default. Using repetition to keep the eye familiar with our design's elements means nosotros're taking advantage of this tendency. Nosotros can also apply shapes, colors, textures, fonts, etc. to maintain this consistency via repetition.

You lot can also achieve repetition by using repeated messages. If you lot want your customers to know that you're the cheapest or the fastest in the business, you lot'll want to tell them that on more than one occasion if you want the message to stick. In this instance, we use repetition for reinforcement. You may remember learning your times tables by repeating them until yous drummed them into your heed. The principle hither is the same. We retain information ameliorate the more ofttimes we come across it and internalize it.

Pattern

Patterns are simply a repetition of more than than one blueprint element working in concert with each other. A seamless pattern is ane where every element within a pattern (no thing how often it'due south repeated) combines to form a whole. This is most common in backgrounds on web and app pages. It's also popular in rug and wallpaper design. Look around you: your bed encompass, wall, notebook cover. If you come across a seamless pattern, wait at it closely. Practice you see how the elements (circles, spirals, cones, pineapples, etc.) appear again and once again in the same way? Sometimes, they bear on; sometimes, they have space between them.

Writer/Copyright holder: Dirk Stoop. Copyright terms and licence: CC Past-NC 2.0

Equally y'all might expect, designers base of operations most patterns on colors, textures and shapes, rather than words. We can recognize shapes far more quickly than words, which we have to read, no matter how quickly. Yous can discover such patterns in compages, too. Architects tend to include a unifying motif on the inside and outside of buildings to enhance the aesthetic appeal. This is nothing new. Call up of ancient Greek buildings such as the Parthenon. Aboriginal designers could exist ingenious in their apply of patterns of such elements equally lines and spirals.

When you lot consider using patterns in your web or app design, you'll want to call back almost the pattern's complexity. While it might seem like a nice idea to tile a single image every bit a background, this can make information technology much harder to read the text that lies over the pattern. If yous want to create a pattern for a site that deals with travel to Greece, you could use the summit of an aboriginal cavalcade for your design. At first, it looks keen; you've got a beautiful design that features circles and grape leaves.

However, you still take to add text. And then, writing over this, you shortly notice a trouble. The dark writing sometimes falls over the image's dark lines. You could employ brighter text, such as white or yellow, but you'll discover that the grey stone makes it hard to read, likewise. Y'all're having trouble reading it, and then will your users. They want to engage with your design, non work to attempt and read text. Simplicity and subtlety are key considerations if you want to maintain the user experience, keeping users on your page.

Rhythm

When you repeat elements, the intervals between those repetitions tin can create a sense of rhythm in the viewer and a sense of movement. Musicians create rhythm in the spacing betwixt notes, effectively making these "silent" gaps play off the notes. Designers insert spacing between elements to make rhythm. There are, broadly speaking, v types of visual rhythm.

Author/Copyright holder: Eden-Lys. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Random rhythm – Repeating elements with no specific regular interval creates random rhythms. The spacing could exist a millimeter here, a centimeter there, while the elements could exist all over the identify. Think of falling snow, pebbles on a embankment, traffic movements: they are all examples of random rhythms in action.

It'south also worth noting that a rhythm may appear random if you examine a modest section of the rhythm. However, if y'all step back and examine a larger department, it may exist that there is a regular but complex rhythm practical to the design. Call back that you have positive and negative images, which you lot can use so that both the elements and the spaces betwixt them make your design hard to "predict". By using a larger series of elements, you lot'll take virtually limitless possibilities to play with. The artist René Magritte made peculiarly interesting use of random rhythm.

Regular rhythm – Like the beating of a heart, the regular rhythm follows the same intervals over and again. You tin can easily make a regular rhythm only by creating a grid or a serial of vertical lines. The user's eye will instantly recognize a regular rhythm, scanning it for any irregularities in the process. Remember, the eye "likes" to be drawn to outstanding elements. Therefore, in that location is a risk that when yous're using a regular rhythm in a design that it tin can get monotonous (like the dripping of a tap).

Alternating rhythm – You can echo more than one element in a design. In an alternate blueprint, you utilise a 1-2-1-ii-1-2 pattern. Think of the blackness and white squares on a chessboard: that'due south an alternating rhythm in play. An alternating rhythm is, in fact, a regular rhythm with more than complication. It could be every bit straightforward as our chessboard, or we could envision something more than intricate. Some fantastic alternating rhythms include rows of fish, birds, or other animals. Taking fish equally an case, we can see that each identical fish is post-obit another. Below, the sequence is repeated; still, the negative space between the rows shows fish of the other color (which we accept to be the groundwork) swimming the other mode, the fine lines of their fins and tails interlocking with those of the get-go design of fish. M.C. Escher's Lizard (1942) is another dandy example of this, incorporating three colors of lizards with a pair of lizards of each color facing away from each other, tail to tail. As simple or complex as we want to make an alternating rhythm, it can be an easy way to break upward the monotony of a regular rhythm.

Flowing rhythm – A flowing rhythm shows the repeated elements following bends, curves, and undulations. In nature, yous tin can encounter this in the waves on a beach or sand dunes. As designers, we can mimic nature by making wonderful patterns of elements with flowing rhythm. We can bear witness clumps of seaweed underwater, their strands gently facing in a serial of directions. The user imagines them washing against each other.

Progressive rhythm – Nosotros can make a progressive rhythm simply past irresolute one characteristic of a motif equally we repeat it. We could draw a serial of circles, one to a higher place the other, making each lower ane larger. Do you see how the largest one at the lesser looks like it's closest to you? Nosotros can brand a progressive rhythm alter subtly or dramatically. Yous could add together shade to the smaller circles progressively so that the smallest one at the top is dark, the middle one in partial shade, and the biggest one only slightly shaded. Progressive rhythms surround us. If you were to video someone dancing and then examine that video frame-by-frame, yous would have a progressive rhythm.

Designing with Repetition, Design, and Rhythm

The use of repeated visual elements is a technique designers usually employ in web design. Y'all can repeat design elements, for example, to provide a consistent visual experience. Information technology will brand information technology easier for users to focus on the content considering they know where they can observe specific types of content or navigation options.

You tin as well use repetition to draw attention to a particular area of content or pattern. You lot can employ it to bear witness relationships betwixt content blocks, too.

Too, you can use patterns for backgrounds to add texture and consistency, and you lot tin deploy them to deliver consistency betwixt pages of the same type.

Every bit designers, we tin can apply rhythm to create excitement (building gradually over fourth dimension) or reassurance (a heartbeat might exist perfect on a page aimed at expectant mothers, for example). Or, nosotros can utilize it to influence other emotions.

The Take Away

As a designer, yous accept three types of repetition:

• Repetition
• Patterns
• Rhythm

You lot can use these to shape the user experience of your web or app. Through repetition, patterns, or rhythm, you set "the mood" of the user interface and use these elements to either reinforce your message and/or create the look and feel of your product.

Repetition is the simplest element yous can utilize. Pattern is a combination of elements that are repeated. Rhythm involves using intervals or spaces between elements to give the user an impression of rhythm or movement. We can use five types of rhythm:

• Random Rhythm
• Regular Rhythm
• Alternating Rhythm
• Flowing Rhythm
• Progressive Rhythm

There is also another formulation of pattern that comes from builder Christopher Alexander. We will examine that in a afterward article. Rhythm, similar in music, helps build a cadence in your blueprint, engaging your users with all sorts of interesting variations. With some idea, you lot tin can maximize the impact of your bulletin by working the right rhythm into your blueprint.

References & Where to Larn More

• Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Jonas Bengtsson. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY ii.0
• Pattern in Art: Repetition, Blueprint, and Rhythm. Sophia Learning. Retrieved from: http://world wide web.sophia.org/tutorials/design-in-art-repetition-pattern-and-rhythm. [2014, Aug]
• Swinburne. Bones Blueprint Principles. Retrieved from: http://world wide web.swinburne.edu.au/design/tutorials/design/design/#4. [2014 Aug]

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Source: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/repetition-pattern-and-rhythm

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