Emphasis

Emphasis is the best principle of design. Emphasis is establishing a focal point in an image by which the artist or designer may use opposing sizes, shapes, contrasting color or other means to place greater attencion on certain areas, objects or feeling in a work of art. When a picture uses emphasis you can easily see what the main idea of the image is. It is very useful when there is a point that you want to get across using a picture. When you have a picture would you want everyone that looks at it to know the point you want to get across? Having a lot of lesser parts of an image to get one part to stand out or "emphasize" it will help you do that. Without emphasis pictures would never have any easily visible points and will get very confusing. We all always need to use the best and most important principal, emphasis.

For example, this picture shows a group of people holding hands. The emphasis is easily seen on the chests of the stick people. All of them but one have checks on them and the one has an X. The creator could be trying to show emphasis on that person for being a different type of person or in some way different from the others.

In this picture from a beach the first thing your eye is drawn to is the bent tree right in the middle. The person that took this picture definitely wanted anybody looking at this picture to clearly see the bent tree. He wanted the whole picture to clearly represent this abnormality of the tree.