Let’s go back in time.
It’s dusk. You are wading through the high-grass plains of prehistoric Asia. No matter how carefully you proceed, your eyes fail to parse out the landscape before you. Thousands of years of evolution have given you a sharp survival instinct. You sense danger, but you cannot see the shadow. Your Homo erectus eyes scan the panoramic view, looking for movement and shapes, anything that can communicate potential threats. The ability to see a broad gamut of color provided by the sophisticated color receptors in your retina allows you to catch a glimpse of orange amongst the green. Your brain processes this information in an instant, allowing you a brief moment to react and sound the alarm.
You survive the encounter. Others in your tribe failed. The ability to separate out information from the noise saves you, and you’ll pass along these traits to your descendants.
Our senses have been refined over many millennia of natural selection. We can take in millions of data points per second and calculate our response in an instantaneous fashion.
Contrast Is Fundamental
Contrast is the discernible difference between things, or a thing and its surroundings. In a more philosophical sense, contrast is essential to us understanding the world around us, being what separates meaningful communication from noise, and as such, it is essential for conveying any message.
We are hardwired by evolution to react to contrast. Our brains process incredible amounts of information, reducing data to its most fundamental forms: silhouettes, colors, and patterns. If you glance upon the silhouette of an insect on your desk, you may reflectively recoil, even though it’s not an insect at all. Your brain saw the shape, its contrast from the desk, and filled in the blanks in a millisecond. We know that the black and yellow stripes of an insect can mean danger, and when we see yellow and black in the environment, it captures our eye reflexively, causing our minds to further clarify the stimulation.
Is it any wonder that so many hazard signs in our modern world use this motif to warn us of danger? Or that ads, posters, and more use contrast to draw our eye? Understanding how our brains sort useful information from the noise is at the heart of understanding how to make communication stand out.
Contrast of Opposites
As designers, we often want to make the most beautiful thing. We hope that wonderful design will speak for itself, but on a shelf full or a social media feed full of beautiful things, you have to decide on a goal. Is it to be a beautiful thing amongst the others, or to stand apart? Ideally, you can accomplish both with good design, but before your message can be heard, it has to contrast from the surrounding ones. And that can sometimes be at odds with pure aesthetics.
(To be clear, this doesn’t mean your design should be ugly to stand apart from all the beautiful designs competing with it, but it does require your design to be beautiful and smart in its choices to be noticed.)
Contrast In Quiet
We frequently think of contrast as a mostly visual concept, but these basic principles apply to all communication that employs our senses—the audio we hear, the aroma we smell, the textures we feel, the flavors we taste.
If you are at an oppressively loud event, what’s the one thing that you want more than anything? Quiet. This tells us a lot about how our mind works, and how overstimulation can be exhausting. In this particular example, there’s a better way to communicate:
Create quiet.
Like the Homo erectus in the grassy plains, our brains are working very hard to sift through all the noise for something useful, scanning the landscape for information. Sometimes you just need to get away from the noise to make sense of it.
If you’re at a deafeningly loud concert, you may want to go outside. If your eyes are overwhelmed with detail, you may seek something with less detail. In a sense, you’re following nature’s way by finding an area of lower concentration, a path of the least resistance.
In visual design, quiet may be white space, the negative space around design elements that allows for breathing room. Using a lot of white space can provide a quiet place for your eye to land when scanning a busy landscape.
The next time you are at a store, give this exercise a try: go to the beer aisle, a typically busy space visually, and notice how so many of the labels are trying to get your attention. Many brands use beautifully detailed patterns and art on their packaging. Now, brand recognition notwithstanding, what labels do you find drawing your eye? It may very well be the simplest, unadorned label of the bunch, with “white space” around clearly readable text that jumps out at you because it gives your eye something quiet and ordered in the chaos. This is a strategic choice by the designer to provide a quiet place for your eye. If it caught your eye, it worked.
Contrast Can Surprise
Stay in the beer aisle. Think about the smells. The sounds. In your mind, do you hear the elevator Muzak? Do you feel the cool of the refrigeration? Your eyes may draw your focus, but your mind is taking in everything.
Your mind is working on more than what your eyes see. Using the other senses is like finding a path around those obstructions, and it’s why you have things like PA systems for making announcements during sporting events and fire alarms. It cuts straight to the core of our mind, past what we can see, and tells us something emergent is happening.
This extends to our other senses as well. Consider what you smell when you walk by a restaurant, or the rough texture on a highway’s margins, warning the driver that they have veered too far off the path.
Contrast Evolves
Not that many years ago, print magazines and newspapers were how people got most of their daily information. The living room was the center of American culture, dominated by network television.
Today, we take the living room with us wherever we go. As such, we have nothing short of a tsunami of messages crashing against us at all times. That can lead to a level of disengagement. As advertisers, we must meet audiences where they are, but this means our voices will be amongst the deafening choir.
How do you stand out in the infinite scroll of Instagram or TikTok? Contrast can be of use in solving this problem.
We know how contrast is not always about being loudest, that sometimes contrast is counterintuitive, that sometimes it’s about being quiet in the noise. We also know that being beautiful in a sea of beauty isn’t always good enough to get you noticed. Contrast tells us a lot about how our message can cut through when carefully considered against the competition. This may sound like a given, but it’s amazing just what a high percentage of messaging you see doesn’t really factor in this basic strategy, as is evident in the sameness of so much content.
Contrast Is Smart
Contrast is about carefully considering the environment and the noise from the competing voices in order to be strategic about the type, the medium, the timing, and the tone of a message in order to stand apart, and in doing so, find a new route to your audience’s minds. In short, contrast is about being smarter.
Sometimes it’s not about being taller than the grass to see the tiger—it’s about having a lawnmower.
Let Mad Genius be your lawnmower. Get in touch, and let’s use contrast to get your message seen. Or heard. Or felt, or smelled, or tasted.