page is balanced, but it’s too balanced. Too much of a good thing. Symmetry
drains your design of an important quality: variety. The only documents that
value extreme symmetry are wedding invitations, and they are often tasteless
in other ways too. On some wedding invitations, complete symmetry is com-
bined with script fonts: All that’s missing is cheap perfume and they could
win the World Championship of Bad Taste.So now you’ve got white space, gray blocks of text, black blocks of headlines,
and some in-between graphics, photos, charts, and so on. Of all these compo-
nents, white space (the lighter areas) is usually the most important.You’re doing a design, a visual composition.You’ve probably seen paintings by
Mondrian. He arranged squares and rectangles into attractive and balanced
compositions. He didn’t balance his works of art by putting four identical
squares in the four quadrants of a page, as shown in Figure 8-1. That’s bal-
anced, all right, but it’s boringly symmetrical. You face a similar task: avoid
symmetry, but achieve a balanced composition.Another problem with Figure 8-1 is that there’s probably too much text (rep-
resented by the gray blocks). Adding some white space would relieve the too-
gray look.Figure 8-2 illustrates the opposite extreme: excessive asymmetry. The design
in Figure 8-2 manages to avoid the tedium of symmetry, but is not balanced.
Also, the two identical headline-text areas are badly positioned. Their posi-
tions look haphazard.Figure 8-1:
Symmetry is
balanced,
but boring.