Using Elements and Principles of Design to Tell Visual Stories
- Amanda Nuir Myrdal
- Jan 24, 2023
- 14 min read
Updated: Jul 16
The Elemetns of Design are the ingridents and the Princples of Design is the recipe!
Below is a description each Elemnts and Princple of Design with a graphic provided for ease of downloading to your phone or computer.
Elements of Design (The Ingridents)
Line: The Tracks for Your Eyes
A line is a path created by a moving point through space. It is the most powerful tool you have to create depth on a flat screen or print, acting as a track that forces the viewer's eye exactly where you want it to go.
The Two Ways to Use Lines
Actual Lines: Real, visible lines built into the scene—like a highway, a fence, or a handrail.
Implied Lines: Invisible lines your brain automatically connects—like a row of streetlights, or a character staring intently at an object (eyeline).
Leading Lines & Depth
When lines run from the foreground toward the background, they become leading lines. They create an illusion of 3D depth by funneling the viewer's eyes deep into the horizon or directly to your main subject.
Pro-Tip for Filmmakers & Photographers: Don't just place your subject randomly in the frame. Look for the lines already in the room (walls, sidewalks, shadows) and use them like arrows to point straight at your subject!
Shape: The Key to Instant Recognition
A shape is created whenever a line closes to seal off a flat, 2D area. While form looks 3D, shape is completely flat. In photos and movies, shapes are used for instant recognition—they help the audience understand a scene in a fraction of a second.
Geometric vs. Organic Shapes
Geometric Shapes: Perfect, sharp, and mathematical (squares, circles, triangles). They are usually man-made, like buildings, windows, or doorways.
Organic Shapes: Irregular, free-form, and flowing. They are found in nature, like mountains, leaves, or the silhouette of a person.
The Secret Weapon: Silhouettes
Silhouettes are the ultimate way to use shape. By blowing out the background light and turning your subject into a black cutout, you strip away all color and texture. The audience is forced to look only at the raw shape of your subject.
Example: A person standing inside a giant, circular architectural window frame. The round window creates a perfect geometric frame around the organic shape of the human silhouette.
Color: The Audience's Emotional Volume Dial
Color is the visual response of our brains to different wavelengths of light. In photography and filmmaking, color isn't just decoration—it is your most powerful tool for guiding attention and triggering instant emotional reactions without a single word of dialogue.
The Three Properties of Color
Every color in your frame is defined by three things:
Hue: The name of the color itself (e.g., Red, Blue, Green).
Value: How light or dark the color is (adding white makes a pastel; adding black makes a deep shadow).
Saturation: The intensity or purity of the color (vibrant and neon vs. washed-out and gray).
Using Color Schemes to Tell Stories
Complementary Colors (Contrast): Colors directly opposite each other on the color wheel (like Blue and Orange, or Red and Green). When placed together, they vibrate and make your subject instantly pop off the screen.
Example: A street photo of a pedestrian in a stark cobalt blue coat framed against an intense, rustic orange wall.
Analogous Colors (Harmony): Colors next to each other on the wheel (like Red, Orange, and Yellow). They create a soothing, unified, and peaceful mood.
Monochromatic Colors (Atmosphere): Using variations of just one single hue.
Example: Think of the clinical, sickly green tones throughout The Matrix, or the gloomy, desaturated blues of a sad movie scene.
Texture: The Visual Sensation of Touch
While photography and film are two-dimensional mediums trapped on flat screens and paper, texture is the secret weapon creators use to trigger the visual sensation of touch. It adds realism, weight, and deep emotional resonance to your images.
Tactile vs. Implied Texture: The Great Illusion
In design, there are two ways we look at texture:
Tactile (Actual) Texture: This is physical. It’s the rough surface of concrete, the soft weave of a blanket, or the weathered grain of wood that you can feel with your fingers.
Implied (Visual) Texture: This is the photographer's job. Your phone or camera screen is perfectly smooth glass, but by using light and contrast, you create the illusion of a 3D texture on a completely flat surface. Your brain looks at the photo and uses past memories to fill in how it would feel.
The Secret to Revealing Texture: Side-Lighting
If you blast a subject with direct, flat light from the front, you will wash out all its details and ruin the texture.
To make texture pop, you need low-angle side-lighting. When light rakes across a rough surface from the side, it hits the peaks and leaves the valleys in total darkness. These tiny micro-shadows are what define the three-dimensional depth (form) of the texture, making it explode off the screen.
Using Texture for Emotional Impact
Texture doesn’t just look cool—it tells the audience how to feel about a subject or character.
Wisdom and Endurance: Think of an extreme close-up (macro shot) capturing the intricate, deep grooves of dry tree bark or the deeply lined skin of an elderly person. These textures tell a story of time passing, strength, and survival.
Tactility and Mood: A macro shot of raindrops sitting perfectly suspended on a tightly woven fabric creates an immediate mood of coldness, isolation, or quiet contemplation.
PRO-TIP: Next time your composition feels flat or boring, hunt for texture! Look for rough walls, rusted metal, or intricate patterns. Introducing a gritty or highly detailed surface adds immediate character and tactile interaction, practically forcing your viewer to stop and stare.
Space: Giving Your Subject Room to Breathe
In photography and film, space is the literal canvas you have to work with inside your frame. It’s how you arrange your subjects to create a sense of depth, distance, or isolation. Space dictates whether a shot feels suffocatingly crowded or peacefully empty.
Positive vs. Negative Space
Positive Space: The actual subject of your photo—the person, the car, the bird, or the building. It’s where the viewer's eye is supposed to land.
Negative Space: The empty area around your subject (like a blank wall, a foggy field, or an empty sky). Negative space isn't "wasted" space; it acts as breathing room that forces the audience to focus entirely on the subject.
The Power of Minimalism & Isolation
By manipulating the balance between positive and negative space, you control the emotional weight of your story:
Immense Breathing Room: If your negative space takes up 90% of the frame, your subject feels small, quiet, or free.
Example: A single, solitary seagull captured in flight, surrounded entirely by a vast expanse of clear, pale blue sky. The emptiness of the sky gives the bird a massive sense of scale and freedom.
Creating Tension: Leaving too much empty space can also make a character look incredibly lonely, isolated, or overwhelmed by their environment.
PRO-TIP: Don't be afraid of emptiness! Beginners often try to fill every inch of the frame with "stuff." If you want your subject to feel important, powerful, or lonely, back up and let the negative space do the heavy lifting.
The Principles of Design(The Recipe)
Balance: Controlling the Weight of Your Shot
Visual components have weight. Where you place elements determines the balance of the shot, which dictates whether a composition feels peacefully static or dynamically engaging.
Symmetrical Balance
A frame where the left side is a perfect mirror image of the right side. This is achieved through perfectly centered shots, such as looking down the aisle of an ornate Gothic cathedral or a grand library. Symmetrical balance instantly creates a sense of peace, stability, grandeur, and formality.
Asymmetrical Balance
Creating stability using elements of different visual weights (e.g., a large dark object on one side balanced by a lot of empty negative space or smaller objects on the other). This is often achieved using the Rule of Thirds and feels much more dynamic, modern, and complex than perfect symmetry.
PRO-TIP: Look for balance when your composition feels chaotic. If a scene is messy, finding a mirrored reflection or using a stark symmetrical layout can instantly bring order, peace, and a grand scale to the frame that draws the viewer right in!
Contrast: The Visual Battle That Commands Attention
Have you ever looked at an image that felt incredibly intense, moody, or dramatic, even though nothing was actually moving? That punchy, cinematic energy usually comes down to one powerful tool: contrast.
In film and photography, contrast is the ultimate battle between light and dark. It is the secret weapon creators use to command instant attention, define three-dimensional shapes, and set a heavy psychological mood without saying a single word.
The Clash of Tones: High vs. Low
At its simplest, contrast is the scale of difference between the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows in your frame.
High Contrast (The Drama Generator): Features striking bright whites and deep, pure blacks with very little middle ground (gray) in between. It feels punchy, aggressive, and highly cinematic.
Low Contrast (The Mood Softener): Features a narrow range of tones, mostly stuck in the middle grays. It feels soft, dreamy, nostalgic, or muted.
The Ultimate Power Move: Rembrandt Lighting
If you want to use contrast to bring classic drama into the modern world, you use a timeless technique called Rembrandt lighting (named after the famous Dutch painter).
Imagine a high-contrast side-profile portrait where a harsh window light illuminates one side of the face, while the other side drops off into deep shadow—except for a signature, bright triangle of light captured on the dark cheek just below the eye. There are no smooth, soft transitions here; the sharp, defined separation between the highlights and shadows carves out the face like a sculpture.
By deliberately hiding half of your subject in darkness while keeping that single, brilliant triangle of light, you introduce instant visual tension, mystery, and an immediate sense of emotional depth.
Masterclass: High Contrast Across a Variety of Skin Tones
Creating high contrast isn't a one-size-fits-all formula. Because different skin tones absorb and reflect light in vastly different ways, you have to adapt your lighting setup to ensure your contrast looks intentional, intentional, and stunning.
For Deeper Skin Tones: High contrast isn't just about harsh shadows—it’s about leveraging specular highlights (the bright reflections off the skin). Instead of blasting a direct front light, place a light source slightly behind or to the side of your subject to catch the rich contours of their face. This creates a brilliant "glow" or rim light that separates them beautifully from a dark background, establishing high contrast through reflection rather than just darkness.
For Fairer Skin Tones: Lighter skin tones act like a white projection screen, reflecting a massive amount of light. If your light source is too bright or too close, you will "blow out" the highlights, losing all the skin's natural texture. Keep your light source slightly further away, or use a diffuser (like a sheer curtain) to keep the highlight side clean while letting the shadow side fall off sharply.
Exposure vs. Lighting: Remember, lighting creates contrast, not your camera settings. Never try to create contrast by drastically over-exposing or under-exposing the image in your camera, as this will just destroy your details. Frame your light first, look at how it interacts with your subject's specific skin tone, and then expose for the highlights!
How Filmmakers Harness the Dark
High contrast isn't just for cool still photos—it is a staple of cinema history.
Film Noir & Thrillers: Directors use harsh, slicing shadows (like light cutting through window blinds) to make characters look untrustworthy, trapped, or split between good and evil.
Establishing Threat: Forcing a character to step out of pitch-black darkness into a single beam of light instantly tells the audience that the environment is dangerous or isolating.
Emphasis: The Art of the Focal Point
Imagine walking into a crowded room where everyone is talking at once. It’s chaotic, overwhelming, and impossible to know who to listen to. The same exact thing happens in photography and filmmaking when an image has too much going on.
As a visual storyteller, your job is to be the director of the viewer's eyes. You do this using a core design principle: Emphasis.
What is Emphasis?
At its core, Emphasis is the practice of creating a focal point—a specific area in your frame that commands the viewer’s attention first. It is the punchline of your visual joke, the twist in your story, or the emotional anchor of your shot.
Without a clear focal point, an audience will wander aimlessly around your frame, get bored, and scroll away.
Emphasis: Forcing Focus via Isolation
There are many ways to create emphasis (like using bright colors or contrasting shapes), but one of the most powerful, cinematic tricks in the playbook is using a shallow depth of field.
Shallow Depth of Field: A camera setting where only a tiny slice of your frame is in sharp focus, while everything else in front of or behind it is completely blurred out.
Imagine a close-up shot of a single, vibrant red tulip. The petals are so sharp you can see the texture of the dew drops clinging to them. Meanwhile, the entire background—an entire field of other plants and trees—drops off into a smooth, beautiful, painterly blur (known in the camera world as bokeh).
Because the human eye naturally flies toward sharp details and ignores blurry shapes, you have successfully forced the viewer's focus onto that single, solitary point. You have isolated your subject and given it total emphasis.
How Filmmakers Direct Your Eyes
Directors and cinematographers use this exact depth-of-field trick to control how you process a story in real-time:
The "Rack Focus": Imagine a character in the foreground talking, and they are perfectly sharp while the background is blurry. Suddenly, the camera operator shifts the focus ring. The character becomes a blur, and a mysterious figure standing in the doorway behind them snaps into crisp focus. Without moving the camera an inch, the filmmaker just forced you to look at a new plot point.
Isolating Emotion: In heavy dramatic scenes, a filmmaker will use a telephoto lens with a shallow depth of field to completely blur out the environment. This strips away all distractions, leaving the audience trapped in an intimate space with nothing but the actor's raw facial expressions.
PRO-TIP: Want to try this on your smartphone or DSLR? You need to do three things: get physically close to your subject, maximize the distance between your subject and the background, and drop your lens's f-stop number as low as it can go (like f/1.8 or f/2.8). Lock your focus directly onto the most important detail—like the eye of a person or the petal of a flower—and watch the background melt away into instant cinematic drama!
Movement: the Illusion of Time
Have you ever looked at a photograph and felt like you could actually hear the roar of an engine or feel the rush of a passing wind? Even though a photo is a completely frozen moment in time, great photographers and filmmakers know how to trick your brain into feeling action.
They do this by mastering a dynamic principle of design: Movement.
What is Movement?
In visual art, Movement is the path the viewer’s eye takes through your frame, or the literal depiction of action within a single shot. It is the tool that transforms a static, lifeless image into a living story.
Without movement, an image can feel stagnant—like hitting pause on a movie during an uninteresting scene. By introducing it, you give your artwork a heartbeat, a sense of direction, and an emotional pace.
Movement: Freezing Time vs. Long Exposure
One of the most thrilling ways to experiment with movement in a photography class is by playing with your camera's shutter speed. You have two choices: you can freeze a split second forever, or you can let time bleed across the frame using a long exposure.
Freezing Time (The High-Speed Slice)
If you want to capture a moment that moves too fast for the human eye to see, you need to use a fast shutter speed.
Fast Shutter Speed: A technique where the camera's shutter opens and closes in a tiny fraction of a second (like 1/1000th or 1/2000th of a second), slicing through time to instantly lock motion in place.
Imagine a basketball player driving to the hoop. To the crowd, it's a blur of limbs and jersey fabric. But with a fast shutter speed, you can freeze time: the player is suspended perfectly in mid-air, every muscle is defined, a bead of sweat is trapped floating in space, and the basketball is completely still right at the tip of their fingers. By eliminating all blur, you give the audience a chance to inspect the raw power and detail of a single, hyper-focused moment.
Long Exposure (The Illusion of Speed)
On the flip side, if you want to let time bleed across the frame to show the journey of the movement, you use a long exposure. Just like the Light Painting we did at the beginning of the year but you dont have to be in the dark or use a light to draw. The bodies movement is the light that looks like a trail of light moving.
Long Exposure: (click on the link on the text to learn how to adjust manual settings for exposure.) A technique where the camera’s shutter stays open for a longer period (seconds or even minutes), capturing everything that moves as a fluid, artistic blur while keeping still objects perfectly sharp.
Imagine a photograph taken deep inside a bustling underground subway station. The concrete platform, the support pillars, and a person waiting on a bench are all perfectly still, crisp, and sharp. But right next to them, a passing train is transformed into long, glowing streaks of color and light.
Because the train is blurred while the platform is still, the image creates a powerful illusion of incredible speed and direction. It tells a story about the fast- paced nature of city life versus a single moment of waiting.
How Filmmakers Direct Your Trajectory
In cinema, movement isn't just about moving the physical camera on a track; it's about guiding where the audience looks as the plot unfolds:
Linear Subject Movement: A character running from the left side of the screen to the right naturally forces the audience's eyes to scan ahead, anticipating what danger or destination lies just off-camera.
The Cinematic Motion Blur: Directors often use a slower shutter speed during chaotic action sequences or dream scenes. By allowing the movement of a character's hands or a spinning room to blur slightly, the filmmaker makes the audience feel exactly what the character is feeling: disorientation, panic, or sheer speed.
PRO-TIP: To capture long exposure movement yourself, you need to keep your camera completely steady so the background stays sharp. Grab a tripod (or balance your phone against a sturdy book) and find a moving light source, like traffic at night or a spinning amusement park ride. Drop your shutter speed down to 2 or 3 seconds, press the shutter, and watch time paint itself right across your lens!
Repetition and Pattern: Visual Rhythm
Have you ever listened to a song with a beat so catchy that your foot starts tapping without you even realizing it? Music relies on rhythm to keep you hooked. In the visual world, photographers and filmmakers do the exact same thing—not with sound waves, but with shapes, lines, and colors.
They pull off this hypnotic trick using the power of Repetition and Pattern.
What are Repetition and Pattern?
While they sound similar, these two principles work together like a beat and a melody:
Repetition: Using the same visual element—like a shape, color, or line—more than once throughout your frame.
Pattern: Taking those repeated elements and arranging them in a predictable, organized combination.
When you combine them, you create visual rhythm. The human brain loves order; it naturally searches for structure in the chaos of everyday life. By filling your frame with a repeating pattern, you give the viewer's eyes a smooth, satisfying track to slide along.
Repetition: Creating Hypnotic Visual Rhythm
One of the most effective ways to study pattern is to step outside the classroom and look up at the world around you. You can find stunning rhythm built directly into modern architecture and everyday environments.
Imagine an abstract, close-up photograph of a modern skyscraper's facade. Instead of showing the whole building, the frame is packed tightly with rows upon rows of identical, repeating windows running from edge to edge.
Because the windows are perfectly uniform and never-ending, the image completely loses its sense of scale. It stops looking like a simple office building and transforms into a mesmerizing, geometric texture. The repetition creates a hypnotic cadence that forces the viewer to appreciate the abstract beauty of lines and reflections.
How Filmmakers Use Patterns to Tell Stories
Directors don't just use patterns because they look clean; they use them to manipulate how an audience feels about a scene:
Establishing Conformity: Think of a shot inside a school or a dystopian factory where rows of identical desks or lockers stretch out infinitely into the background. A filmmaker uses this heavy repetition to instantly communicate themes of strict discipline, boredom, or a loss of individuality.
Breaking the Pattern (The Ultimate Reveal): The most powerful thing you can do with a pattern is build it up just to break it. Imagine twenty soldiers marching in flawless, repeating synchronization, but one of them stops and looks directly at the camera. By introducing a "glitch" into a perfect visual rhythm, you create an instant, explosive focal point that screams to the audience: Look right here, this is where the story changes.
PRO-TIP: To make your patterns look incredibly intentional, use a filling-the-frame technique. Zoom in or step close enough so that the repeating pattern touches all four corners of your viewfinder. Eliminating the distracting edges of the environment makes the visual rhythm feel infinite and truly hypnotic!
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