Week 6 Syntactical Guidelines

Here is an artist that I have been following for about 5-6 years. He goes by the name of Shepard Fairey, but his companies, and more widely known name, Obey. He uses some  Syntactical guidelines as he constructed this design. The first thing that I noticed was how balanced this design is. This design is quite structured and symmetrical. His design is leveled and gives an overall sense of calmness.  He uses an all black background creating this positive and negative space relationship. The black area being the negative space and the beige being the foreground. He also developed this pattern like quality by repetition. His patterns are forcing our eyes to group each "ring" as an individual piece.

Here is my example of poor design. The text reads "foundation", which is a slight contradiction to what the graphics are telling me in this design. First off, the definition of foundation is as follows: "the natural or prepared ground or base on which some structure rests." Besides being unsymetrical, this design is highly sharpened as the black tree, and the focal point of my eye, is weighted heavily in the lower right hand corner. None of these things make me feel like a foundation is being, or going to be, built. There is an active diagonal direction created by the black tree to the right. This is creating stress in the design. THe design is weighted heavy towards the bottom of the page creating this unbalance composition. Unfortunately, none of these things make me feel like a foundation is being, or going to be, achieved.