Fundamental principles of lights and shadows (for designers)
It’s been quite a long time since I last published something on Medium, now I am planning to publish a new article every week, so make sure you follow me to check whether I stick to this or not.
For those who think that this article belongs to Science geeks or geeky students, I want to clarify one thing: no, this is not. That’s why I pointed out ‘for designers’ in brackets in the title.
Understanding the basic principles will help us level up our designs and also makes our designs more realistic. And in this article, I will explain to you two fundamental principles of lights and shadows, so without any further, let’s get started.
The First Principle
The first principle is that the light source will be on top of you no matter where you are, whether outside your home or inside. For example, when travelling outside, the light source, in this case, the sun, is on top of you. Or when you are inside your house, the light source, tube light, for example, is also on top of you.
Note: that this does not apply to every scenario, but it’s generally a good practice to keep in mind.
The Second Principle
The second principle is that whenever a subject is casting a shadow, there’s also a place where the light source is directly hitting the subject, which means that area will be brighter. Let’s take a look at an example:
In the image above, the light coming from the sun directly hits the ball and casts a shadow. If you look closely at the side of the ball, where the light is directly hitting the ball, you can see that area is brighter than the rest.
This is the universal principle that whenever alight is directly hitting a subject, the area at which it hits will be brighter than the rest.
Summary
These are the two basic principles that I want to share with you. And if you want to learn more on this topic, I have put some further readings below.
Thanks
So, that’s pretty much it. I hope you found this article helpful. You can share this article with your designer friends so that they also learn something valuable.
And in my next upcoming youtube video, I will implement these two principles in design and create a 3D button inside Figma. So if you don’t want to miss that video, make sure you subscribe to the channel.
Thank you again for sticking it till the end. I will see you in my next article. Till then, take care and bye.
