Less Is More

Hello!

Our February Take 3 Challenge over on Facebook contains the following 3 prompts:

I often hear people say that they struggle with a clean and simple style of making - it can be challenging to strip things back, especially when we love layers and textures! Keeping things clean and simple, really forces us to think about composition and to make choices about what to leave out. I have a few tips and techniques to share which I hope you will find helpful!

White Space

A core principle of clean and simple design is preserving some 'white space' on your project. By the way, white space does not have to be white! It is simply a term for some empty space or clearer areas in the design. While it can be tempting to cover the whole surface with colour and pattern, white space actually serves a really valuable purpose:

• it provides contrast with busier areas of the design

• it provides a calmer space for the eye to 'rest'

• it gives your focal point and composition space to 'breathe' rather than looking cluttered.

On this card, the 'white space' around the focal panel is actually black but it achieves the purpose of providing contrast and creating calmer space that ensures the focal point isn't competing with anything else.

Composition

When we are only placing a few elements on our design to keep it clean and simple, we need to think more carefully about where we place them to ensure that the end result looks balanced. Composition is a rich topic in its own right and I won't go in to all of it here but these are a few composition techniques that I find myself using most often:

Diagonals

As in the card example above, I often work from one corner to another on a project. This layout helps guide the eye across the design and gives it a nice flow. If I had elements of equal weight (ie size, colour, detail) in all 4 corners, the eye would end up travelling around the card and the focal point would lose some its impact. It would also reduce the opportunity for white space too.

Clusters

When adding pattern and images to your project, think about keeping them in clusters - layer them up and group them together. This helps to give them impact rather than having small elements scattered across the project and getting a bit lost. If you have more than one cluster of elements, it can be helpful to have one cluster larger than the other so that they are not fighting for attention!

This card contains a loose example of a cluster - the majority of the interest is grouped together, leaving the space around it empty. If the bee was placed separately from the hexagons and the sentiment somewhere different the viewer would have to decide where you want them to look. It is also a loose diagonal layout as the hexagons are fading out from left to right so your eye is also travelling across the card.

The Rule of 3

You have probably heard about the 'rule of 3' - for some reason, our eye tends to prefer odd rather than even numbers on a design so we often intuitively add 3 rather than 2 or 4 embellishments. In terms of layout, it can also be helpful to create visual triangles on the design. If I am not working in a diagonal then I will quite often have a larger focal point (or cluster) as the anchor for the design and 2 smaller elements in a loosely triangular layout. You may well do this already intuitively because it looks 'right'....have a look at recent makes to see if this is something you already do without thinking about it!

Contrast

The more visual contrast you can bring in to your design, the more impact it is likely to have. What do I mean by visual contrast? It can be anything which puts 2 very different elements close together. Black and white is a fundamental contrast but it could be a combination of geometric and organic shapes (straight and soft lines together), small patterns combined with big shapes etc. This concept of contrast is particularly useful in clean and simple designs as the 'white space' gives more visual contrast to the pattern/colour/design that you do add.

In this card, I created a strong and busy border by masking off the Broken Hexagons stamp which contrasts with the white space across the rest of the panel. You may also notice that I have overlapped the floral and the border to add more weight at the bottom left corner of the card. The contrasts on this card are between geometric and floral, black and white, patterned space and white space etc. If your design feels a bit flat or uninteresting, think about whether there you can add a contrasting element - just a single pop of a contrasting colour can make a huge difference.

There are No Rules!

I have given you some ideas/techniques that I often use when putting together a clean and simple design. However, as with everything, use as much or as little of it as works for you and your style. As you can see from the card above, if I was adhering strictly to the concept of white space, I might not have added splatter but who can resist a bit of splatter?! If something makes your heart sing, just do it. These concepts can be useful to kickstart your clean and simple make but going off on your own path is to be encouraged too :)

The 3 cards that I have made in today's post also feature the colour yellow and sentiments of thanks so they are good to go for the February challenge prompts :) I have used our new Let It Bee collection to put these designs together and you can find that in store.

I hope you have found this post useful and it has got you inspired to have a go at our challenge this month! I would also love to hear any of your tried and tested techniques for creating clean and simple designs. I can incorporate them in to a future post :)