What does Visual Unity means and how can it be achieved?

One of the most important things we have to take into account when we are developing any project is to define and maintain a visual unity. We call unity the fact that several elements in a design look as a whole. There are several ways to achieve this unity, but right now we'll focus on Visual Unity. We can say that the elements in a design have a Visual Unity when we can establish a visual connection between every single component of the composition. If you notice your design as a whole, instead of noticing every single item individually, it means you managed to achieve visual unity for your design.

Every single piece of art we create is composed by visual elements such as lines, shapes, volumes, color, tones and textures. How we integrate this items is the key to succeed when it comes to visual unity. Every single one of this components needs to follow the Design Principles, which tell us to maintain harmony and unity, and at the same time emphasize our center of interest. To get there, there are different concepts to apply such as Proximity, Repetition, Alignment and Contrast.

Proximity is perhaps one of the easiest ways to attain our goal. When elements are far away from each other, it's more possible to think of each one of them as an individual, but if we put them close enough, we might get the feeling that they are somehow associated, and we think of the entire element as a whole, not as individual pieces. If we take a look at this image, we can see how the fact of putting things together changes the picture completely.



Repetition of a shape, a color, or any of the previously mentioned visual elements helps to reach easily visual unity. This means we should repeat an element of our composition constantly, this way, our audience or costumers can get the feeling they're looking at a global concept and not loose pieces.



When we take the time to align our work, we have notorious changes in the final result. Alignment not only helps organization, but also helps visual unity.



Contrast helps us to determine which elements of our composition are more relevant than the others. By using this technique, we not only give unity to our designs, but we also manage to transmit a clear message and draw the user's attention to what we think is the main element of our work.



When using all those different elements it's important to have a determined layout, create a structure and respect it. It's useful to mix this elements in order to get better results, just remember not to put more things than you really need.

Icon design is a discipline that needs to make constant use of this elements in order to create high quality products. For example, iconshock creates several icon sets, each one of them with an specific theme. Designers need to make sure their icons show visual unity, that way, when a costumer purchases icon sets and use them in their software or web page, they'll look good and maintain one of the most important design principles: Visual Unity. Visit iconshock to see a few icon sets examples.

Thanks to figg.com for the illustrations of design concepts.