What Is Composition in Graphic Design?

This fundamental design concept conveys beauty, logic, and coherence through color, shape, and symmetry

It’s important to understand how to achieve engaging, solid, and coherent compositions when exploring visuals. Colors, shape, space, and symmetry are just some of the aspects to consider in a creative composition.

All graphic designers must know about (and indeed master) these and other elements in order to create marketing materials that will connect with their target audience. Explore this fundamental concept in-depth with art director, editorial designer, and typographer Javier Alcaraz (@javieralcaraz).

What is composition?

Composition is the art of uniting several elements into a whole, which is why the official definition of composition in the art world is simply: to arrange forms in space.

This can be achieved by:

- Bringing them together
- Creating connections between them
- Placing them in a certain way or a certain order

Composition as a methodology

By definition, using composition as a methodology enables you to pull together various aspects of a particular language to create a whole.

For example, writing conveys ideas using visual symbols known as letters. In semantics, choosing the correct words helps readers or audiences understand the intended meaning. Syntax is the art of giving words meaning by their position in a sentence.

Composition is also important in music. It involves the organization of sounds and silence in time to create an impact with listeners. It too has its own rules:

- Harmony links the chords and connects the various parts of a piece
- Melodies assign meaning and identity to certain sounds, they create hierarchy
- Rhythm is the movement established by the succession of elements, it’s also found in dance, poetry, and the visual arts

Graphic design uses visual syntax to reinforce meaning. Visual aesthetics is also a language made up of unique features and elements.

Concepts to help you to think about composition

In graphic design processes, the composition process is often one of the most important ways to resolve a visual problem. Some of the graphic design concepts passed down through history include:

- Unity
- Weight
- Rhythm
- Movement
- Balance
- Contrast

The complexity of composing a film

Film is a fabulous, complex, discipline that combines the arts of writing, sound, and visuals.

Narrative structure tells the story in a logical and meaningful way. Audiovisual storytelling pays close attention to the pace and harmony of scene structure. Each frame or shot is composed by aligning the individual elements with the film's practical, aesthetic, and narrative intentions.

Movement and variety are just two of the visual criteria used to achieve this balance, while DoPs (Director of Photography) obsess over:

- Shot type
- Lighting
- Contrast
- Depth of field

How do you create a composition?

The quest for a coherent whole determines the order of each of the individual parts. It’s important to include and connect all the elements into a harmonious composition and to achieve this, you need to consider:

- Color (this tutorial explains how to use color to shape your compositions.)
- Shape
- Proximity
- Orientation

The art of composition gives leaves you with endless options to create your final piece, but the key thing is to remember that - no matter how varied your design elements are - you want to make sure that ultimately they all look like parts of a whole.

The keys to composition

In short, you need to remember that:

- The goal of any composition is to achieve unity

- Each visual element should underpin a key theme or idea that unifies the work

- The idea shapes the way the various elements relate to each other, and how your set of elements relates to the space. It also helps create the perception of a unified whole.

- Visual unity is synonymous with coherence. Coherent ideas are seen as logical, without confusing contradictions that can lead to a lack of trust or low aesthetic satisfaction.

- Designing a whole means designing a system of connections that articulate your visual message.

This syntax of visual language is what Javier Alcaraz - a graphic designer who specializes in editorial, branding and typography - looks at in his course, Compositional Techniques for Graphic Design. Sign up to learn his step-by-step method for creating impactful graphic compositions as he teaches you the basic components of this visual language and how to express them through design.

English version by @studiogaunt.

You may also like:

- Be Inspired to Compose Artistic Photos
- 10 Free Color Palette Websites To Achieve Harmony And Contrast
- 5 Essential Books to Learn Composition and Balance
- Artistic Photography Compositing, a course by Carlos Herrejón
- Creative Composition for Illustration with Procreate, a course by Chabaski