I have never read / learned about the elements of visual communication, but Dondis’ primer was very similar to the more general elements of art (color, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value) which I am very familiar with. There is significant overlap, such as in line, shape, color, and texture, but I found Dondis’ primer is more specific in other areas such as in describing direction, tone, scale, etc.

The Dot

I love dots (especially Dippin’ Dots)! They are super simple, and you can use them as a building block in the same way as most people use line as a unit. In manual terms, dots as a unit is much more intensive compared to using line because they are almost smaller or otherwise inconveniently sized (constrained by pen size, etc, or the proportionality of a dot’s radius).

Dondis’ point about dots being very natural because of their roundness was really enlightening and contrary to my usual associations with dots. I liked the visualization of a droplet being formed on a surface as a dot. At the same time, the juxtaposition of dots being used as manmade reference points or markers was interesting to me because as I mentioned earlier, even though Dondis made his point about dots being natural, I associate them with manmade phenomena because in art and design, dots are almost always perfectly circular and there are rarely perfect circles in the natural world. For instance, the art of Roy Lichtenstein looks very manmade, like printed comics, and part of the reason is from the dots which he used as shading to provide tone (rather than the colors themselves providing tonality).

Tone

I’d mostly lumped tone as a subcategory of color, thinking of tone as different shades of the same hue. Dondis separates color into hue, saturation, and brightness with my understanding of tone is the most similar to his explanation of brightness - he even describes it as the “tonal gradation” from “light to dark.” However, tone/brightness (in the context of color) is extremely important to convey dimensionality visually, since whenever we look at the world around us, we perceive depth based on cues we get from varying tonality.

The use of tone to create depth can be seen in many older versions of logos (the old Apple logo, the old Google logo’s lettering), but interestingly enough, when I think of visual design, tone is rarely used for depth because it seems that flatness is more prevalent in visual design. For instance, both the current Apple and Google logos are flat and tone-less. Furthermore, as Dondis mentioned, tone in design is much more limited than tone in the natural world. Perhaps the inability to truly replicate the subtly in tone from nature results in an uncanny valley effect in visual design, causing people to sometimes steer away from it together.