Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I CHAPTER II THE PRINCIPLES OF FORM AND THEIR RELATION TO THE DECORATIVE IDEA THE term "design" has generally meant the choice and arrangement of certain shapes or forms to produce a decorative effect. It should include not only form but colour, or rather colour and form, for without colour there is no form. If all objects were exactly the same colour tone it would be impossible to see where one object left off and the other began. In fact, there would be no shapes or forms to discuss. The greater the colour contrast in hue, value, or intensity, or any two or three of these qualities, the more clearly defined is the form arrangement which these objects produce. The real recognition of form is a mental process, and it is sufficient to remark here that this is a comparison of previously acquired ideas. Form is not quickly perceived through the sense of sight like colour. This makes the study of form more involved and perhaps, in many cases, less easily understood at first. Design or composition includes, then, the choice and arrangement of colours, forms and lines with a unit as the desired result. This unit may be the exterior of a huge cathedral, the interior of any room, the individual unit used in any one of these, or whatever in itself expresses the unit idea. As has already been noted, the structure is the fundamental reason for all decorated things. The build or structure determines the form. The form, then, conversely, is the result of structural lines of certain kinds used in certain combinations to represent individual ideas. When we realize that everything depends upon the structural idea it is much easier to see relationships between shapes or forms in furnishing construction and the room in which they are to be used, than if we see parts of furnis...