The Cut That Breaks the Rule

The idea: emphasis

Emphasis is the principle of making one part of a work stand out so that the viewer looks there first. That part, the focal point, is set apart by contrast, isolation or placement, or by breaking a pattern the rest of the work sets up.

In a notan: In a notan every cut is already loud, because each one sets dark against light twice. Emphasis therefore comes from the exception. Let most of the cuts follow a rule, the same size, the same shape, the same fold edge, and let one cut break it: the eye goes straight to the one piece that folds the other way. Notan adds a catch of its own. Every focal cut is a pair, a hole and a piece, and the two can compete, so part of the craft is deciding which of them is the true focal point. And because every piece shares the one Back color, you cannot simply paint one piece brighter: emphasis has to be built from shape, size, direction and placement.

A focal point is the place the eye goes first. In most pictures it is made by contrast: the brightest light, the sharpest edge, the one warm color. A notan cannot lean on that, because every cut is already as contrasted as a cut can be. What a notan can do is set up an expectation and then break it. Repeat a cut until the eye learns the rule, then change one thing about one of them. Psychologists call the result the isolation effect, described by Hedwig von Restorff in 1933: the item that differs from its neighbors is the one we notice and remember.

There are four simple exceptions to try: a different size, a different shape, a different fold edge, and a different position, set apart from the group. You will make all four from the same starting field, test them on real viewers, and then face the problem that belongs to notan alone: the focal cut always comes as a twin. Finally you leave the screen, stamp a field of marks in paint, and cut the one place that breaks the rule.

Art history

Arthur Wesley Dow called this principle subordination in Composition (1899): the parts of a design grouped under one dominant element, so that the eye has somewhere to arrive. The works below each make one element dominant with remarkably little: a beam of light, a burst in a night sky, a single red mark, a swelling in a grid.

• Caravaggio The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600 Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

  A shaft of light enters a dark room from the upper right, above Christ’s pointing hand, and falls on the men gathered at a table. The light is one pale diagonal in a mostly dark picture, a two-value decision on the scale of a chapel wall. Follow it and you arrive where Caravaggio wants you.

• Utagawa Hiroshige Fireworks at Ryōgoku, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1858

  Most of this tall print is dark night sky. High above the bridge and the boats, a firework bursts into a spray of small points of light. The focal point is made by rarity: in a picture that is almost all dark, one small burst of light is enough.

• Henri Matisse Icarus, plate VIII from Jazz, 1947

  A black figure, cut from paper, hangs in a blue ground among yellow star shapes. At its chest is one small red shape, often read as its heart. The figure is the subject, but the red mark is the focal point: the only shape of its color, and one of the smallest. A single exception can outweigh a much larger form.

• Victor Vasarely Vega-Nor, 1969 Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York

  An orderly grid appears to swell toward the viewer at its center, its cells growing larger there and smaller toward the edges. The rule is the grid, and the emphasis is where the grid bends. Vasarely needed no new shape to make a focal point, only a change in the rule itself.

Design today

Designers use emphasis to tell people what to do next. On a screen, the main action usually gets the one filled, colored button while the others are outlined or plain; Google’s Material Design gives its floating action button to the primary action of a screen. On a newspaper’s front page, one story gets the largest headline and the largest photograph, so readers know which matters most. Emphasis works only by comparison: when every button is bold, none of them is.

Wayfinding depends on it. The green emergency exit sign with its running figure, designed by Yukio Ota in Japan and now an international standard, has to win against a hallway crowded with notices, so it breaks the rule of every sign around it in color and symbol. Designers test emphasis much as this activity does: they blur or squint at a layout, or show it to someone for a few seconds, and ask what they saw first.

Warm-up

Find the odd one out. Draw a grid of twenty small circles, all the same except one that is slightly larger. Swap with a partner and time how long each of you takes to find the exception. Then try a grid where one circle is a square, and one where a circle sits slightly apart from the rest. Which exception was found fastest? You will test the same four in the studio.

In the studio

Make it in Studio Notan, where every cut can be moved, refolded and undone.

1. Set up the rule. In the studio, choose Ellipse and draw a small circle near the top left of the sheet, pressing Shift once the drag has begun so it stays round. Fold it up with the ↑ arrow.
2. Repeat it exactly. Choose Move and select the circle. In ‘Transform’ on the Controls tab, set the Move ‘Horizontal’ to a little more than the circle’s width, set ‘Copies’ to 4, check the cyan preview, and press ‘Apply’. Each copy is a new cut with the same fold edge, so there is now a row of five holes and, above the sheet, a row of five pieces (see Copies). Select the whole row and repeat it once with a ‘Vertical’ move a little more than the circle’s height and ‘Copies’ at 1. This field is the rule.
3. Break it by fold edge. Select the circle at the right end of the lower row and click the arrow beside the right side of its box. Its piece folds home and then out over the right edge. Every other piece still sits above the sheet; this one sits alone to the right. Press Undo (⌘Z) and Redo (⇧⌘Z) a few times to switch between the rule and the exception, and notice how fast your eye finds the change (see Undo and redo).
4. Break it by size, shape and position. Undo back to the plain field, then make three more versions with one change each. For size, drag a corner handle of one circle with Shift held until it is about twice as wide. For shape, delete one circle and cut a Triangle of the same width in its place, folded up. For position, drag one circle well away from the field. Save each version with ‘Save project’ in the File menu so you can reopen them for testing.
5. Test on real viewers. Show each version to a partner for three seconds, then hide it and ask them to point to where the odd cut was. Record which versions were found. Then push further: how small a change in size still wins in three seconds?
6. Solve the twin problem. Every focal cut is a pair, the hole in the sheet and the piece beyond it. Look at your strongest version and decide which of the two is the real focal point, then support it. If the piece matters most, give it an edge to itself, with no other pieces nearby. If the hole matters most, let its piece fall in among the other pieces, where it blends in. A cut that touches the edge of the sheet opens into a notch, and its piece meets it at the fold, so the pair reads as one mirrored figure straddling the edge, a single focal point.
7. Refine and share. Choose your best version and decide where on the sheet the focal cut should sit, then remove anything that competes with it. Share it with ‘Edit a copy’ in Share, so a classmate can open their own copy and try to make the emphasis stronger.

With paper and paint: Stamp the rule, cut the exception

Copies makes every cut in the studio identical, so the rule is perfect and even a tiny exception shows. A field stamped by hand is never perfect. Each mark carries a little more or a little less paint, and each edge is a little softer or sharper than the last. That variation is the lesson: an exception has to be bolder than the natural unevenness of the rule, or the eye files it away as one more accident. Paint also lets you try the exception the studio rules out, one mark of a different color, the device Matisse used for the small red shape in Icarus, cut from paper his assistants had painted with gouache. You can set it against the notan’s own exception, a single cut folded out where nothing else is. And because a cut in paper cannot be undone, you choose that one cut with care.

1. Mark two grids. Cover the table. On each black sheet, use the ruler and white pencil to make light dots in a grid four across and four down, an inch and a half apart, with the outer dots an inch and a quarter in from the edges. Each dot is the center of one mark. On both sheets, circle the same dot in the bottom row, with a ring small enough for the mark or the cut to cover.
2. Stamp the rule. Brush a thin, even layer of white paint onto the plate. Press the cork into it, blot it once on scrap paper, and print one mark on each dot of the first sheet, pressing straight down and lifting straight up. Reload before every mark, so each carries about the same paint. Leave the circled dot empty: that place is saved for a cut.
3. Stamp a painted exception. Print the second field the same way, but at the circled dot, stamp one mark in red with a clean cork. This is the exception the studio does not allow, a single mark of a different color, like the small red shape in Matisse’s Icarus.
4. Read the unevenness. While the marks dry, which takes only a few minutes for thin paint, look closely. No two marks are quite alike: one is fainter, one has a ragged edge, one sits a little off its dot. Ask a partner whether any white mark already looks like an exception. If one does, the rule is loose, and your exception will have to be bolder than that accident.
5. Cut the exception. On the first sheet, set the cork on the empty dot and trace around it with the white pencil, so the hole matches the marks in size. Cut out the circle on the mat with the craft knife, turning the paper rather than the knife as you go, or with scissors after an adult has made a short starting slit on the line, so the circle you will fold out stays whole.
6. Fold it out. Glue each black sheet near the top of a white ground, with the glue stick on its back, leaving open ground below. Turn the circle over, out across the bottom edge, and glue it as far below the edge as its hole sits above it. Now look at the pair. The hole shows white through the black, much like the painted marks around it, so it nearly hides in the field. The piece is the only black shape on the white ground, and it is the one the eye finds: the twin problem from the studio, settled by paint.
7. Test for three seconds. Show each sheet to a partner for three seconds, then hide it and ask them to point to the exception. Try several viewers and record who found which, and how fast. Which wins: the red mark, or the black piece folded out where nothing else is? Then compare with your studio results. Which exceptions win in both media, and which only in one?

Take care: Cut on a self-healing mat with the blade moving away from your body and your other hand behind it, and let an adult handle the knife for young learners. Use paints labeled non-toxic (look for the ACMI AP seal), cover the table, let the marks dry fully before you cut, and wash the cork and brush before the paint dries on them.

Take it further

Try emphasis without an exception. Select a single cut, click one corner of the reference-point grid in ‘Transform’, set the ‘Angle’ to 30 and ‘Copies’ to 11, and press ‘Apply’. The copies fan around that corner like petals, and the eye goes to the point where they meet, even though nothing is there. This is emphasis by convergence, the device a painter uses when every line in a room leads to one face. Which holds the eye longer: convergence or the exception?

Reflect

• Which kind of exception did viewers find fastest, and which was easiest to overlook?
• In your strongest version, is the focal point the hole or the piece, and what did you do to make it win?
• How did the rule you set up, exact on screen and uneven in paint, make the exception possible?
• Where have you seen a single exception used to guide you, in a building, on a screen or on a page?

What to look for

• The field is exact: the same size, the same spacing and the same fold edge, made with Transform and Copies.
• Each version changes exactly one property of one cut.
• Most viewers find the focal cut within three seconds.
• The learner can say whether the hole or the piece is the focal point and point to what makes it win.
• The stamped field keeps an even size and spacing, so the one cut or red mark reads as the exception rather than as another accident.