Lessons
- The stronger images (the first two) have the most evident depth. The last image - oddly - has a stack of elements, yet with not depth.
On Negative Shapes
- Seeking asymmetry with respect to negative space seems important. This can be accomplished several different ways:
* major difference in size
* major difference in shape, especially in how the negative space cuts into the image. For example, when all the negative space occupies the margins, even when they are of different size and shapes there is some level of uniformity. With the third, one of the negative shapes .
* Stout shapes, i.e. squares and triangular elements, tend to be an obstacle to movement. In a bunch of cases I used squares since they seemed to be a ‘neat’ and an alternative to triangles, but almost in every case they weakened the image.
The stronger shapes tend to be long and irregular shapes, or small and very irregular shapes. Again, the third has some good examples of something that is part rectangle and part triangle - resembling neither. In sum, staying away from strict geometry helps. I likewise ran into trouble with sections that were too rectangular.
Anyway, I am sure in some cases this can work - I think the general rule is that the negative space should be defining the energy, yet not explicitly the focal point. And in these different cases where they did not work, it was because they became the focal point.
Other problems were too much similarity with the shapes, even when they are fairly irregular and occupying different spaces. Here gestalt grouping / comparison comes into play and then they become the focus.
So overall, I experimented with a lot of different negative space patterns, and the overall lesson is casting out anti-patterns that became evident after the fact.
