The Art Secret Behind All Great Design
Composition Speaks Before Content
When I was a young child, I would often pull books off of my father’s shelf and stare at their pages. In a clip from a 1987 home video that has established itself in our family canon — my father opens our apartment door, welcoming my newborn little sister home for the first time. There I stood, waiting for his arrival, in front of his bookshelves, holding an open book. From behind the camera, Dad said, “There’s Chris looking at the books. He doesn’t read the books…” I’m not sure I caught the remark at the time, but with every replay — and there were many — it began to sting. The truth was I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did know my Dad was right — I wasn’t reading the books. Had I known then what I know now, I might have shared these words, from the artist Piet Mondrian, with my Dad:
“Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.” — Piet Mondrian
For most of my time as a working designer, this has absolutely been true, though I wasn’t fully aware of it. And it’s possible that one doesn’t need to think this way, or even agree with Mondrian, to be a good designer. But I have found that fully understanding Mondrian’s point has helped me greatly. I no longer worry about how long it takes me to do my work, and I doubt my design choices far less. I enjoy executing the fundamentals more, and I feel far less pressure to conform my work to current styles or overly decorate it to make it stand out. It has helped me extract more power from simplicity.
This shift in perspective led me to a deeper question: I get Mondrian’s point — I feel it. But what, exactly, was I responding to in those childhood encounters with my father’s books, and why do certain visual arrangements feel inherently satisfying? A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed.
Mondrian understood this intuitively. His geometric abstractions stripped away all representational content, leaving only the pure relationships between lines, colors, and spaces. Yet his paintings remain deeply compelling, suggesting that there’s something fundamental about visual structure itself that speaks to us — a language of form that exists independent of subject matter.
Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning.
This might explain why composition can be satisfying independent of content. When I look at my childrens’ art books, I can appreciate the composition of a Mondrian painting alongside them, even though they are primarily excited about the colors and shapes. We’re both “reading” the same visual language, just at different levels of sophistication. The fundamental grammar of visual composition speaks to us both.
The parallels with reading go even deeper. Just as written language uses spacing, punctuation, and paragraph breaks to create rhythm and guide comprehension, visual composition uses negative space, leading lines, and structural elements to guide our eye and create meaning. These aren’t just aesthetic choices — they’re part of a visual syntax that our brains are wired to process.
This might also explain why certain compositional principles appear across cultures and throughout history. The way we process visual hierarchy, balance, and proportion might be as fundamental to human perception as our ability to recognize faces or interpret gestures. It’s a kind of visual universal grammar, to borrow Chomsky’s linguistic term.
What’s particularly fascinating is how this “reading” of composition happens at an almost precognitive level. Before we can name what we’re seeing or why we like it, our brains have already processed and responded to the underlying compositional structure. It’s as if there’s a part of our mind that reads pure form, independent of content or context.
Mondrian’s work provides the perfect laboratory for understanding this phenomenon. His paintings contain no recognizable objects, no narrative content, no emotional subject matter in the traditional sense. Yet they continue to captivate viewers more than a century later. What we’re responding to is exactly what he identified: the beauty of relationships between visual elements — the conversation between lines, the tension between colors, the rhythm of spaces.
Understanding composition as a form of reading might help explain why design can feel both intuitive and learnable. Just as we naturally acquire language through exposure but can also study its rules formally, we develop an intuitive sense of composition through experience while also being able to learn its principles explicitly.
Looking at well-composed images or designs can feel like reading poetry in a language we didn’t know we knew. The syntax is familiar even when we can’t name the rules, and the meaning emerges not from what we’re looking at, but from how the elements relate to each other in space.
In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing.
This understanding of composition as fundamental visual language has profound implications for how we approach design work. When we do this intentionally, we’re applying a kind of secret knowledge of graphic design: the best design works at a purely visual level, regardless of what specific words or images occupy the surface. This is why the “squint test” works. When we squint at a designed surface, the details are blurred but the overall structure remains visible, allowing us to see things like hierarchy and tonal balance more clearly. This is a critical tool for designers; we inevitably reach a point when we need to see past the content in order to ensure that it is seen by others.
No matter what I am creating — whether it is a screen in an application, a page on a website, or any other asset — I always begin with a wireframe. Most designers do this. But my secret is that I stick with wireframes far longer than most people would imagine. Regardless of how much material my layout will eventually contain is ready to go, I almost always finalize my layout choices using stand-in material. For images, that means grey boxes, for text, that means grey lines. The reason I do this is because I know that what Mondrian said is true: if it is beautiful purely on the merits of its structure, it will work to support just about any text, or any image. I can envision exceptions to this, and I’ve no doubt encountered them, but I have never felt the need to make a significant or labor-intensive structural change once a final images, colors, text, and other elements have been added in.
More and more, I see designers starting with high-fidelity (i.e. fully styled) layouts or even with established components in browser, and while I don’t typically start there when asked for critical feedback, I almost always support the feedback I inevitably give by extolling the merits of wireframing. No matter what the environment, no matter what the form, establishing structure is the most important aspect of our discipline.
The secret of graphic design has always been known by artists: structure does more work than content while convincing its audience of the opposite.
Josef Albers said of the way he created images that they enabled a viewer to “see more than there is.” That is the mystery behind all looking — that there is always more to see than there is visible. Work with that mystery, and you’ll possess a secret that will transform your work.
Written by Christopher Butler on
Tagged