Take your jewelry project ideas to the forefront

Make your next jewelry project ideas surpass all that you’ve designed until now.

After mastering the elements and principles of design, learn to play with them intelligently using the visual properties of form.

Here you’ll find all you need to take the point, line, plane and volume to the next level.

Remember we talked about mixing and matching the visual elements? Well, these elements can be used in jewelry project ideas to become your unique designs.

The shape of your jewelry designs can take the form of the point, the line, the plane or the volume. Each of these has multiple visual possibilities that will give your designs vitality and originality.

Note that we will talk about volume in another page because it deserves special comments on its spatial values.

Learn to unify the elements of design to give your jewelry that avant-garde look.

Lines that make up figures

However, to take advantage of the visual message that a point can convey, its size should be small. If a point starts to grow big, it will become a plane.

Use a point to position something, to make a statement, to add a focal point to your project ideas.

Lines have huge expressive qualities. In jewelry it is very easy to use lines because of its wearable characteristic.

Jewelry wraps itself around the wearer’s body so there are infinite possibilities to entrench lines in your jewelry ideas.

A line is usually recognizable by its length and by its narrowness. However, these visual properties are not absolute. The way a line is conceived gives it a distinctive and expressive quality.

Three aspects of lines may be distinguished:

• Its overall form can be straight, curved, broken, irregular, etc.
• Its width can change the characteristics of the boundaries or edges of the line and its thickness.
• The ends of the line can become prominent or not and gain any shape.

Lines that rise and fall sharply may suggest danger; curves can connote gentleness, soft feelings; horizontal lines may be read as stability and calmness; lines that go about in any fashion may evoke a sense of chaos.

Planes can be modeled into two-dimensional shapes. These shapes in turn can be transformed into a variety of figures. Designers have lots of resources to make up ideas of shapes and figures.

For example, you can take a picture, a photo or a painting and isolate the figures that are implicit in each of them.

Children’s drawings are the best example because they intuitively synthesize the world around them into basic shapes. That’s why a house painted by a child can be easily read as a square with a triangle on top and some smaller rectangles spread inside the square.

The design of figures

• Geometric, mathematically constructed,
• Organic, following natural, curvy lines,
• Regular, with straight lines but not governed by mathematical rules,
• Irregular, limited by undetermined straight or curvy lines,
• Calligraphic, created by hand in a free way,
• Accidental, product of chance and an emotional attitude.

Organic shapes result familiar and are linked with the viewer’s innate experience. They can be literal interpretations of nature or a synthesis of its abstract structures.

Regular figures tend to be related to order and rhythm. They rely basically on angles and symmetry to represent a regular and stable visual interpretation.

Irregular figures are perceived by means of imbalance and asymmetry. They are portrayed usually in an uneven and contrasting fashion.

Calligraphic figures convey a graphical language that has the power to directly deliver a message. These calligraphic shapes can be exaggerated or altered to change the perception of typography to something totally different.

Accidental shapes have the quality of generating spontaneous reactions because its perception has no previous experience.

The unrecognizable nature of accidental or invented shapes provokes fantasy and invention.

Have in mind that these figures and shapes occur somewhere. There is a surface that holds the figures, that grounds them. Every time you portray a figure the surrounding area leaps forward. Unfilled areas are also shapes. These areas are known as the background or as negative space. They can even become more important than the figure itself, which depends on the message you want to get through.

The power of visual arts also resides in the ambiguous nature of optical responses.

You can steer the viewer’s attention from the figure to the background, letting them see completely different shapes.

For example, when the background of a design can be seen in itself as a figure or shape, a figure-ground reversal may occur.

You would normally understand positive shape as the figure that occupies a space and is readily perceived, while negative shape as the surrounding space around the figure.

This is particularly the case in bold design exercises, but that doesn’t describe reality very well when relationships start occurring between figures.

Arranging lines and figures in space

Figures and shapes can be arranged together in various fashions.

These arrangements tend to be defined as formal ones.

You can learn the basic properties of visual form below, but by no means limit yourself to them; they are just the essence in design terminology.

Centralized

Centralized forms have the visual dominance of a regular and centrally located shape. They have a geometric order that structures them. Because of its central nature, they have the qualities of a focal point.

Their dominant characteristic fills them with meaning.

They can also act as a centripetal force or as an organizing point for other grouped geometric elements.

Linear

Linear forms arise from proportional variations in shape size or from the disposition of figures along an axis. A linear form may be fragmented or curved.

It is best used as an organizing element for other figures.

Vertically oriented may signal a point in space and can be horizontally shaped to enclose a space or other figures.

Radial

Radial forms are composed of linear elements radiating from a center. It has the quality of visually combining centrality and linearity. Usually, the center is perceived as the symbolic nucleus or as the organizing point.

This center can acquire visual and formal importance, or on the contrary, become residual with respect to the linear arms. Radial forms are best used by themselves or combined to form network structures.

Grouped

Grouped forms do not require a geometric layout; it’s more of an organized arrangement of forms taking into account dimension, shape or proximity. This type of form is flexible enough to incorporate different elements in shape, size and direction.

Reticular

Reticular forms are an assembly of parallel lines separated in a regular pattern that intersect with each other. The reticule produced is a geometric model that can be used as a structure to visually organize various types of shapes and figures.

Having all this in mind, you have the basic knowledge of the visual properties of form.

Applying all this in your jewelry project ideas will help you to start seeing the world around you with the eyes of a designer.

Now, try different formal impacts between shapes for your jewelry project ideas, here.

Go from Project Ideas back to Design Basics

References used in this section: Ching (1985); Dondis (1973); De Sausmarez (1983); Zelanski and Fisher (1996)