Composition (visual arts) in the context of "Style guide"

Play Trivia Questions online!

or

Skip to study material about Composition (visual arts) in the context of "Style guide"

Ad spacer

⭐ Core Definition: Composition (visual arts)

The term composition means "putting together". It can be thought of as the organization of art. Composition can apply to any work of art, from music through writing and into photography, that is arranged using conscious thought. In the visual arts, composition is often used interchangeably with various terms such as design, form, visual ordering, or formal structure, depending on the context. In graphic design for press and desktop publishing, composition is commonly referred to as page layout.

The composition of a picture is different from its subject (what is depicted), whether a moment from a story, a person or a place. Many subjects, for example Saint George and the Dragon, are often portrayed in art, but using a great range of compositions even though the two figures are typically the only ones shown.

↓ Menu

>>>PUT SHARE BUTTONS HERE<<<

👉 Composition (visual arts) in the context of Style guide

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen pages, is often called a style sheet. The standards documented in a style guide are applicable for either general use, or prescribed use in an individual publication, particular organization, or specific field.

A style guide establishes standard style requirements to improve communication by ensuring consistency within and across documents. They may require certain best practices in writing style, usage, language composition, visual composition, orthography, and typography by setting standards of usage in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, citing sources, formatting of numbers and dates, table appearance and other areas. For academic and technical documents, a guide may also enforce best practices in ethics (such as authorship, research ethics, and disclosure) and compliance (technical and regulatory). For translations, a style guide may even be used to enforce consistent grammar, tone, and localization decisions such as units of measure.

↓ Explore More Topics
In this Dossier

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

↑ Return to Menu

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Abstract art

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and non-representational art are all closely related terms. They have similar, but perhaps not identical, meanings.

Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

↑ Return to Menu

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Page layout

In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.

The high-level page layout involves deciding on the overall arrangement of text and images, and possibly on the size or shape of the medium. These decisions require intelligence, sentience, and creativity on the part of the designer, and they are informed by culture, psychology, and what the document authors and editors wish to communicate and emphasize. Low-level pagination and typesetting are more mechanical processes. Given certain parameters such as boundaries of text areas, the typeface, and font size, justification preference can be done in a straightforward way. Until desktop publishing became dominant, these processes were still done by people, but in modern publishing, they are almost always automated. The result might be published as-is (as for a residential phone book interior) or it might be adjusted by a graphic designer (as for a highly polished, expensive publication).

↑ Return to Menu

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Lettering

Lettering or handlettering is a term for artfully drawing letters, instead of writing them simply. Each letter is created with attention to detail and has a unique role within a composition. Lettering is created as an image, with letters that are meant to be used in a unique configuration. Lettering words do not always translate into alphabets that can later be used in a typeface, since they are created with a specific word in mind.

↑ Return to Menu

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Resurrection of Christ (Raphael)

The Resurrection of Christ (1499–1502), also called The Kinnaird Resurrection (after a former owner of the painting, Lord Kinnaird), is an oil painting on wood by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael. The work is one of the earliest known paintings by the artist, executed between 1499 and 1502. It is probably a piece of an unknown predella, though it has been suggested that the painting could be one of the remaining works of the Baronci Altarpiece, Raphael's first recorded commission (seriously damaged by an earthquake in 1789, fragments of which are today found in museums across Europe). The painting is now in the São Paulo Museum of Art.

The Kinnaird Resurrection is one of the first preserved works of Raphael in which his natural dramatic style of composition was already obvious, as opposed to the gentle poetic style of his master, Pietro Perugino. The extremely rational composition is ruled by a complex ideal geometry which interlinks all the elements of the scene and gives it a strange animated rhythm, transforming the characters in the painting into co-protagonists in a unique "choreography". The painting possesses an esthetic influence from Pinturicchio and Melozzo da Forlì, though the spatial orchestration of the work, with its tendency to movement, shows Raphael's knowledge of the Florentine artistic milieu of the 16th century.

↑ Return to Menu

Composition (visual arts) in the context of Landscape painting

Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in painting of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.

Two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.

↑ Return to Menu