4 Principals of Design in Ancient Texts

1st Impressions

As with most illumiated texts. I could not help but love and appreciate the beautiful artwork. However, I never thought of them before as graphically designed, rather they were simply pretty pictures. In taking a second look at an exaomple of one of these beautiful texts, I feel that maybe, some design elements were not only intentional, but indeed they were necessary.

4 Principals of Design in the Sherborne Missal

Contrast-As seen in the photograph of a page from the Sherborne Missal, contrast is recognized in several areas. First and most prominent is the use of larger, more graphic letters for the beginning of important sections such as the C and D shown here. You can also see in the picture as well in other places in the text the use of contrasting color for words or numbers that I can only assume are very important.

Repetition-Repetition is seen in not only the design elements along the border of the page, but you can clearly see repetition in the core colors used throughout the page and the book.

Alignment-The text is carefully aligned in a justified manner. The major artwork is intentionally aligned to the edges of the pages. The page we are looking at is a right page. In the book, the major artwork is placed towards the center of the open book.

Proximity-This is harder to judge. Everything is so close together. It makes you wonder what came first, the words or the pictures. There is a part of me that feels that the words are simply a detailed explanation of what is implied in the pictures. This would justify the fact that most pages are mostly pictures, but some seem to be slightly more wordy.

In this text the writer/artist uses the faces of important people from within the text as well as art relevant to the story to describe the text. We have to keep in mind that historically, not all members of the church could read, so the pictures were as important in telling the story as the text.