COMPOSITION FROM A MASTER

There's a lot of chatter about the difference of things, but not so much about the commonalities.

"The discipline of design is basically about solving a problem within the construct of a field...that field may be the blank canvas of a space (product design), an entire environment (architecture), or a flat page (graphic design.)"1

I find a lot of students groaning/musing on our college's facebook group about "photography" versus "illustration," or even "page layout." While it is certainly valid to group items by their media for mass assessment  or comparative evaluation, you can easily loose fact that they share the common thread of VISUALLY COMMUNICATING ( a term that has gone out of vogue, and seems to be making a comeback).

The goal for both is to communicate something VISUALLY on the plane of 2d. The other commonality that they share is the fact that the message communicated needs to have a hierarchy... the thread that binds all of the 2d disciplines is composition.

That's why this article on COMPOSITION by the  great HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON is such a good (and IMHO essential) read! Click on the link below (photo) to go to PETA-PIXEL for an amazing compositional lesson–whether your medium is Photography or Gouache – it's worth the time.

photo © magnum

1 P. Pham 2005